


Sudden-Onset Celebrity

by TheAstronomyMod



Series: The Deep Field Universe [4]
Category: British Singers RPF
Genre: F/M, Gen, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-27
Updated: 2014-12-26
Packaged: 2018-01-15 00:48:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 46
Words: 340,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1285030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAstronomyMod/pseuds/TheAstronomyMod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So I wrote a novel. It's fiction but also sort of fan-fiction, though not about a specific artist. It's fan fiction about being-in-a-band, about the Music Industry itself, from skeevy toilet clubs on the Lower East Side to the glittering heights of The Charts and, of course, a semi-romanticised view of NYC in the 90s, from 2 decades' perspective.</p><p>Daniel J. Asheton Jr of Metropolis, and Merry Wythenshawe of Deltawave: two bands, a five-year relationship. One of them takes the major label route to international rock stardom, the other the long, hard slog of being an indie cult band. But the real romance is with pop music itself, and what it's like to love music so much that you are prepared to sacrifice your whole life (and everyone in it) to be able to play it. Can they balance the pressures of success (and the pressures of failure) to keep their musical dreams - and their love - alive?</p><p>Not great literature; a soap opera (with guitars).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cast of Characters

**Author's Note:**

> The main bands in this work are very, very loosely based on the Ludlow St / Luna Lounge scene of the mid to late 90s. But these stories are *my* stories, the characters are my friends and bandmates and lovers from that era, disguised and given new clothes. I've borrowed some sketchy biographical details and the career arcs, as it were, from other existing bands. But it is in NO WAY intended that these characters or these bands be interpreted as being those people. They are all original characters and are not intended as representations of any specific musicians. Some of the stories in this novel are true; but they are things that happened to me, and to my friends, and are not intended as representative of anyone else's stories.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CONTAINS SPOILERS DEPENDING ON WHERE YOU ARE IN THE PLOT!
> 
> By Chapter 30, I realised that the plot had been going on for so long, and the cast of characters had grown so huge, with so many bands, so many record labels, and so many ex-bandmates and ex-lovers, that readers might require a guide.
> 
> (Done almost entirely from memory, so I may have left some people out, and I cannot for the life of me remember Daniel's mother's name. Obviously, his Dad is easy, because Daniel is a Jr.)

Contains some, uh, spoilers...

Metropolis

Daniel J. Asheton Jr - guitar, songwriter, management (long-term partner of Merry)  
Dieter (nee Ezra Dieter Finkel) - bass; visuals and creative concepts  
Doyle Saunders - lead vocals, guitar; sex symbol  
Dick Sticciano - drums; down-home Texan truths

(Duncan Cortez - live keyboards)

Former members

Darin - fired for drinking/quit to go on tour with Motion Sickness  
Dylan - underage, left to go to university  
PCPete - Dieter's housemate / drug dealer / (vague hints at a sexual relationship)

Downtime / Deltawave

Elisha Diamond (nee Diarmud) - keyboards, vocals  
Gabriel Ekangaki - drums  
Miriam "Merry" Wythenshawe - bass, vocals (long-term partner of Daniel)

Record Company and Industry People

Windlass Records - Daniel's first proper job, Deltawave's label  
Sol Glass - owner  
Bebe Newcolm - A&R, Daniel's mentor  
Andre - accounts manager  
Sergei - accounting clerk, introduces Daniel to Dick

Barry Michaels - super-producer, owns Catskills Mansions, partner of Cindy  
Cindy Birdweather - former pop star, Deltawave road manager

Michael - asshole manager of Deltawave

Musketeer Records - Metropolis' label  
Gerry Warschultz - A&R  
Roger - contact in London

Charlie - Three Square Records (Metropolis' first label)

Terry - producer/enginner for Metropolis, owner of Cranberry Sound

Taylor - manager for Metropolis

Charlene - manager of the Lacuna Lounge

MetropoList / Publicists / Street Team  
Emma - PR  
Sandra - runs fan website/mailing list, becomes PR  
Becky - fan website  
Becca - fan website

Metropolis' road crew:  
Simon - driver, eventually soundman  
Tony - tour manager (recruited by Cindy)  
Ronnie - roadie

Established Bands:

Mexican Summers  
Jorge Vincennes - singer / bassist  
Jeanette Flores - dummer

Dead Letters  
Matthew - singer  
Peter Book - bassist, former lover of Merry

The Curse  
Simon Fillup - bassist, Merry's (and Dieter's) idol

Other Scenester Bands

The Charms  
Beth Blair - vocals  
Maddie Cerbone - drums  
Kate Gordon- bass  
Emma Noguchi - guitar

The Rocket Pops  
Jeremy Kane (now deceased) - vocals, guitar  
Phil - guitar  
(drummer and bassist never named)  
Eric - manager

The Bunnygirls  
Laura - guitar (later forms The Louche with Phil Rocket Pops)  
Marla - vocals  
Merry - bass (later forms Downtime)  
Taylor - drums (later manages first the Rocket Pops and then Metropolis)

The Motivators  
Blandford Lannings - vocals (went to school with Daniel)  
Laura - guitar (formerly of Bunnygirls, later of The Louche)  
Merry - bass

The Stakes  
Fabrizio Tiberi (went to school with Daniel)  
Jules  
Al  
Rotating cast of losers

Branwell and the Belles  
Branwell Cortez (brother of Duncan) plus three women not yet named

The Jesus Sugarpussy  
Rob - (guitar) - later works A&R for MVC  
Carlos - (drums) marries Maddie Charms, goes into advertising  
Tony - (bass, vocals) brother of Maddie, his drug addiction wrecks the band

Will Zarnetski - provocateur, party host, DJ and producer

Girlfriends:

Daniel:  
Yvonne (teenage girlfriend from Dalton)  
Merry  
Elizabeth (Record Company rep, we haven't met her yet)

Dick:  
Jessica (Polish girl who kicks him out for being away on tour for 2 years)  
Clara (photographer, we haven't met her yet)

Dieter:  
...not even going to try to list all his lovers...  
a menage a trois with Linda and Frank that comes back to haunt him  
*Dieter's eventual OTP; we have met this person many, many times but not telling because SPOILERS

Doyle:  
Effie (French model)  
Brenda (Spanish telenovela actress)  
Jenny (Swedish)  
Auntie Beast (smack dealer)  
Sal (have we met her yet?)  
... to be continued, endlessly

Family:

The Ashetons:  
Daniel J Asheton Sr - father, owner, Asheton Industrial Accounting  
I am certain Daniel's mother had a name but I can't remember it. TAMARA. Daniel's mother is called Tamara  
Pricilla Asheton - sister, writer, contributing editor at Vogue  
Grandpa Davis - Writer, Hampstead intellectual, Daniel's doppelganger

The Wythenshawes:  
Meredith - mother, Professor of Art History at Williams, corgi lover  
Marcus - brother, deceased in fire  
Jack - father (a bit Freudian; short, slender man with too much curly brown hair and a crooked nose) deceased in fire  
Great Great Grandfather, reputed Duke of Derbyshire (Merry may be a little bit of a liar over this, it's never fully confirmed or denied.)


	2. I Am In A Band

Girls only ever notice you when you're carrying a guitar. At least, that's my experience. I kinda went through a phase where I carried my guitar everywhere, not just to rehearsals and gigs, but to class and even just hanging out in Washington Square to broadcast the fact that I Am In A Band. A Serious Band. But I wasn't even carrying a guitar the first day I saw her. And That Girl didn't just notice me, she looked, she stared, direct, unapologetic, in a way that made me nervous, but also distinctly... excited?

Every Tuesday and Thursday, right around noon, I'd seen her waiting in front of the Pink Pony. (That's the cafe at the top of Ludlow Street where I sloped, hungover from late-running rehearsals the night before, for a breakfast muffin and a cup of tea - Earl Grey, milk, no sugar.) I had carefully arranged my classes for this last term of university so that I got as many lie-ins as possible, as this was crucial in my quest to balance my academic life with the burgeoning career of an East Village musician. But at noon on the dot, That Girl always seemed to be standing waiting outside, sometimes sipping coffee from a _We Are Happy To Serve You_ paper cup, sometimes just smoking a cigarette, but always cradling the gig bag of her guitar in one arm as if it were a boyfriend she was coddling.

If I were Dieter, I would have known what to say, would have bummed a cigarette and wound her into conversation, impressing her, dropping hints about _my band_ \- and no doubt ended up banging her twenty minutes later in the bathroom of the Pink Pony. I'd witnessed Dieter do it, and not just at our gigs. But I'm not Dieter, oozing effortless cool from high Germanic cheekbones, I'm Daniel J. Asheton Jr, just a small, skinny, awkward boy with a crooked nose and rather too much curly light brown hair. I knew I disappeared, in the eyes of women, when I was not carrying a guitar.

The first afternoon I saw her, she was clearly waiting for her own band, above the rehearsal studio that was buried beneath the pavement of Ludlow Street. She was dressed as an archetypical 60s dolly-bird, in a psychedelic minidress and knee-high white go-go boots, with huge plastic sunglasses covering her eyes. A few days later, she was a biker chick, skin-tight black jeans, motorcycle boots and a fringed buckskin vest that showed off a small, ornately coiled Celtic knotwork tattoo on one shoulder. I didn't see her for another week, then she reappeared in a floor length black velvet Moroccan robe writhing with gold and silver paisleys, her hair braided back from her face to reveal massive silver earrings. I smiled at her that day, and half nodded a greeting, but her expression remained impassive beneath the huge mirrored aviator sunglasses that hid half her face, even as she turned expectantly towards me. But I blushed, mumbled apologetically in her general direction, and waited inside until I saw the sidewalk grates open up and admit her into the underworld below. Smooth, Daniel, really fucking smooth.

She was beautiful, yes, though not really my type, in that my type, loosely, was small, delicately featured brunettes with advanced degrees in European Literature. One of them was teaching a couple of my courses that year, and hot damn was I ever smitten. That Girl, however, was tall and athletic looking, and had hair like two bolts of burnished golden silk hanging down past her shoulders, like, classically, rather too obviously, girlie-magazine beautiful. But then again, every girl on the Lower East Side was beautiful that summer, because the only girls I ever seemed to meet were all aspiring actresses, models or whatever. Still, it was not so much her looks, but her clothes that captured my attention. 

OK, I have always had an eye for clothes, though I've never really bothered with fashion. My older sister was the one that was so obsessed with Capital-F Fashion that she had graduated from SVA to working for high gloss fashion mags, first Elle and then Vogue. And maybe I just absorbed her knowledge about clothes by osmosis, the same way I absorbed her record collection, full of mysterious albums by cool 80s bands like The Curse and Dead Letters and Mexican Summers, a million miles away from the shitty metal that the popular boys played in the student lounge at The Collegiate School. Those weird old post-punk records gave nothing away, with their beautiful but impenetrable album art, and their fractured, angular chords wrapped in fuzzy, indistinct reverb. I can't even tell you how much I loved those records when I was a teen, they were like unreadable roadmaps to a place I knew I had to find.

But the one time I took a Dead Letters record to my prep school, one of the older boys had laughed, ripped it off the stereo and scratched it badly, just for the hell of it. It'd taken a month of saving my pocket money to buy my sister a replacement. Still, it had been worth it, just for the looks that a couple of the other, quieter, more intellectual boys had given me, and nodded to me, like, _yeah, this dude is pretty cool, a freshman who knows about Dead Letters, he's one of us_. One of them spoke to me, a couple of weeks later, in German class, and we developed a hesitant friendship, as I got tentatively absorbed from the nerd crowd into the arty crowd.

It was at Collegiate that I'd had to learn the language of Clothes. Ostensibly, our private day school had a uniform, but we teenage boys found a thousand ways to subvert it, in order to display our identities and clique allegiances. An upturned collar, an unfastened top button, one side of the white button-down shirt-front untucked, or both, or neither, all of these things declared crucially important information that could be the difference between gaining you a friend or costing you a wedgie or even a beating. The school handbook specified a plain navy tie for the uniform, but did not specify the brand, so we boys learned how to display the tiny gradations of upper middle class versus upper class by whether our ties were from JC Penny's or Barney's (or, in my case, Liberty of London).

I flirted with rebellion by wearing a tie with a subtle candy-stripe in a lighter blue, and pinned, not with a tie-pin but with a Minor Threat badge, declaring not just my love of music, but the fact that I was straight edge. That was itself a middle finger waved at the school stoners who controlled the stereo in the student lounge. Since I was not only a teetotaller in high school, but also a straight-A student, I walked a constant tightrope between pulling down the grades that made my parents happy, and making friends who would indulge my fanatical love of music. So clothes had become my outlet, and I followed schoolboy fashions like the secret key to a meaningful social life.

But it had taken enrolling at NYU to learn the difference between merely following fashions, and cultivating a Personal Style. I didn't learn that in any classroom though, but from the tall, glamourous dorm-mate I'd acquired halfway through my freshman first semester. My own roommate had left unexpectedly about 2 weeks into term - mono, his apologetic mother had said when she came to collect him - Christ, at least someone was getting kissed!

And then a couple of months later, the registrar had taken me aside and said "Look, Dieter has been having problems with his current dorm mate, we notice you have a spare bed, could you take him in?"

Well, it wasn't spare at that moment; it was at that point storage for two guitars and a bass, but I hadn't said that, I'd said "What's this guy's problem? Why can't he get on with his roommate?"

"You see he's a musician, and apparently he's a bit... loud," the registrar had explained. And you know what, my ears perked up when she said that, and I'd told her, sure, OK, let's meet this musician guy. And Dieter had just moved in.

I hadn't even noticed Dieter at first; I'd noticed the record collection. Although I'd cleared the bed and one wall for him, when I came back to my room after Scepticism 101, the first thing I saw was that my room was a sea of vinyl. Crates and crates of it. It was like I'd died and gone to 12" heaven, and though their owner clearly tended a bit towards the Goth and Industrial end of the spectrum, he had enough from 4AD and SST and Musketeer that I was super-impressed. I'd instantly started digging. I couldn't help myself; put me in a room with vinyl or CDs and it's like those spines have a magic, magnetic Daniel-attracting catnip appeal, just the smell of them, black heavyweight DJ quality vinyl and the old, tattered, fading sleeves stuffed into plastic bags to keep them protected from my curious fingerprints.

"Mein gott, this is a first pressing of Strategien Gegen Architekturen," I must have said aloud as I pulled the record from its slipcase, because someone coughed behind me.

"Go on, slap it on, I see you have a turntable at least," drawled my new roommate, and I'd turned, and there stood Dieter, in the door to the bathroom, drying his hair. That was something I'd have to learn to live with, because Dieter spent 20 minutes every morning blow-drying his hair bone straight with industrial strength Goth Gloop hair gel.

Dieter, though, always knew how to make an impression. He's really tall, for a start, like, I dunno, 6'3"? 6'4"? And he was never one of those guys who slouched down as if apologising for his height. There he'd stood, straight as a ramrod, shoulders at an angle, hips splayed, hair half-shaved, half slicked back across his forehead, dyed jet black, like he had just decided to make a statement, like, 'yeah, I am fucking tall, and I am never going to fit in, so I might just stick out, all the way'. So I'd flipped the needle on that Neubauten record, and I'd offered him a cup of tea, and right from the start, I just thought: Yeah. Me and the owner of this record collection, we are going to get along just fine.

And it was Dieter who'd taught me, both by example, and from photos in cool European magazines like The Face and i-D, that wearing clothing was not just an art form, but a language in its own right, with signifiers and signs and slang all its own. Dieter took me by the hand and guided me, taught me how to blow dry my untameable curly hair straight, taught me how shoes maketh the man, taught me exactly what it was in the 1960s cut of the old man suits I bought semi-instinctually at Domsey's Warehouse that appealed to me so much.

Anyway, this isn't about Dieter, this is about That Girl. The next afternoon I saw her, That Girl was wearing a suit, and not just any kind of suit, but the exact kind of old fashioned 1960s mod 3-button suit that I had started to favour. The suits had started as a reaction against NYU, and all those wealthy hippie kids who came down from Deerfield Academy or wherever, wearing their tie-dye t-shirts and their ripped jeans and their dirty Birkenstock sandals. Me and Dieter had started wearing shirts and ties to every lecture, kind of as a joke, but mostly to offset the slovenly student aesthetic. When asked about this, as Dieter invariably was asked about his unusual appearance and attention-seeking haircuts, he would just fix the interlocutor with one of his haughty stares and tell them that we were expressing our solidarity with the leisure classes.

You should have seen their faces!  We pissed ourselves laughing, later, back in our dorm room. It infuriated the lefties, student and lecturer alike, but Dieter was the kind of man who so thrived on infuriating people that he had taken to wearing jack boots and a distinctly fascistic full-length army great coat to class to go with his Hitler haircut. If those herd-like conformists were going to accuse _him_ , the single biggest pioneering intellectual in the Philosophy Department, of being Right Wing simply for his fashion sense, he might as well go all the way Right and rub their noses in it. Tall, dark and devilishly handsome, Dieter - who was half Jewish, and used this as an excuse never to rehearse on Saturdays (though I secretly suspected this was actually to cover his hangovers) - knew exactly what he was doing, whether he was winding people up, or casually seducing them. As if there were even a difference, said Dieter, his eyes flashing, and then he'd make a quip that to argue about a difference between irritation and flirtation was merely "quibbling over semantics."

But me? I never quite knew what I was doing, especially with women. I looked at this beautiful girl in a sharp mod suit, smirking at me from behind her ray-bans, and I didn't have a clue what to say. As I stood, just looking at her, too surprised to even go into the coffeeshop, she smiled and took off her sunglasses, gazing at me evenly with huge sea-green eyes, as if daring me to speak.

"Do you play guitar?" I asked, stupidly, pointing to the completely obvious gig bag in the crook of her arm.

"Bass, actually." Christ, she had the hint of an accent. Was she actually British, or was that just the affected accent of New England families so affluent they could afford to summer every year in the Lake District? I could feel the insides of my brain - a brain all my professors took great pains to tell me was actually quite a good brain, and totally wasted playing at being a musician on the Lower East Side - start to turn soft and mushy. My mother was British, in fact, I had been born in London and lived in Hampstead until I was 9; I had a definite soft spot for British accents that went beyond the usual mod scene Anglophilia. The moment was passing, my stunned silence was starting to seem rude, and if I didn't say something soon, I would completely blow all of my chances with this amazing looking girl.

"Do you want to join our band? We wear suits," I heard my voice say, high and squeaky and the total opposite of smooth. What the fuck did I say that for? Dieter was already nominally our bass-player, though Dieter was far more interested in keyboards and synthesisers and resented playing such an ungainly, rockist instrument. But the line had, astonishingly enough, worked on Dieter when we first started hanging out after class, because Dieter had never wanted anything so much in his entire life, as to be asked to join a band. The line, however, did not work on this girl, whose face glazed over with a distinctly unimpressed cast.

"What would I want to do that for? I've got two bands already, thanks." And at that moment, the metal basement doors started to clang open, discharging a burst of damp, cigarette-butts-and-beercans air from the studio below, and I had to leap to one side or be knocked down. The girl shrugged, tossed her honey-blonde hair out of the way to shoulder her bass, and started down the rickety stairs, pausing only to throw me a smile that revealed exactly how hopeless she assumed me to be.

And that was that. I still saw her, every week or so, but I changed my morning route and bought tea at Katz's Deli to avoid ever having to speak to her again.

 

\----------

 

A year passed. Dieter and I both graduated - me with a 4.0 average that had cost me continents of coffee and a two month ban on even attending, let alone playing at a single gig, and Dieter barely scraping through, his C minuses and D pluses only offset by the string of As from his minor in Graphic Design. As or Ds were the only grades worth aspiring to, Dieter informed me. Why aim for the mediocrity of a B or a C? But we both agreed, it was time to get serious with our band. But. Unfortunately, my parents did not agree, and refused to continue to subsidise the rent on my apartment on Ludlow Street unless a Proper Job was forthcoming.

I knew that my parents had high hopes for me - hopes that I would follow my father into accounting, and eventually take over the family firm my grandfather had founded. The degree in Philosophy instead of Mathematics had been tolerated, perhaps even a source of grudging pride once I had proved so good at it, but money and maths was where my future had been ordained to lie, since before my birth, while my father was still working through his apprenticeship in the London branch office. But I did not love maths, and certainly did not love money, not even with the casual insouciance of a young man who had never known its lack. 

How could I ever explain to my accountant father, what it was that music meant to me? How could I hope to explain the way that it made my heart race, and my blood pump, and all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, like it held the key to my emotional core? It wasn't just an obsession, it was my entire reason for living. Music provided the structural framework of my whole emotional life. Not just that first day, when I was about 15, that I'd taken my acoustic guitar to school, and held the entire student lounge, metalheads and all, enraptured with my ability to replicate the ringing guitar riff from Where The Streets Have No Name by U2. Not even that evening I was 17, and sat with the same guitar, outside the social tea dance at The Dalton School, and actually so impressed a group of girls with the solo from Sweet Child of Mine that one of them had miraculously asked me to dance, then given me my first hand-job in the stairwell behind the gym.

No, music had saved my life much earlier, when a bored, lonely, half-English 10 year old with no friends in the foreign, unfamiliar city had flipped down the radio dial and heard the dulcet tones of Casey Casem - who I'd recognised as Shaggy off Scooby Doo, my favourite cartoon - counting down the Top 40. Other 10 year olds might have been obsessed with collecting baseball cards or Transformers figurines, but I lived and breathed the Top 40. Records appeared out of nowhere, climbed breathlessly up the dizzying heights, became over-familiar through repeated play, and then plummeted down again. Every week was like a tiny soap opera, and a mock battle, re-enacted for my listening pleasure, intoxicating competitions between rival bands, as I listened, on tenterhooks, rooting for my favourite tracks. I had my champions, and my challengers, old friends to be greeted and new faces to be judged. Would Prince defeat Michael Jackson, or would that endless reign of Thriller carry on forever? There was a point where I could not remember a time in my life when a single from Thriller had not been in the charts, and could not even imagine what Prince might do next to topple Jackson. The chart battles of 1982 were the most exciting thing I had ever experienced in my life.

And the most amazing thing about it, I discovered in my early teens, was how many of the bands in the Top 40 were actually British, just like my passport declared me to be. Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Echo and the Bunnymen, all of them unspeakably cool, and all of them _English_. Far more than postcards from my cousins or embarrassing christmas presents from my aunts, those bands were a kind of link to my childhood. I played a game where I pretended that they might actually have been my friends, had I stayed in London. I'd put on The Clash's Combat Rock and play along with my guitar, jumping up and down excitedly on my bed as if I was playing Wembley Stadium with my best mates, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones.

Those distinctive London accents in The Clash were a telegraph back to my childhood in Hampstead, where my family home had been loud and boisterous and happy. My parents had hosted parties every weekend, and on Saturday evenings, the sitting room slowly filled up, both with pipe-smoke, and with artists and writers, my mother's friends, with their colourful Mod clothes and their outrageous opinions and their habits of talking to small, curly-haired boys as if they were equals or even co-cospiritors. When my family had moved to New York, the Saturday evening dinner parties continued, but they were full of my father's friends. These were mostly stuffy old accountants with grey suits and grey hair and grey skin and grey minds, who even smelled grey, the same disinfectant tang as those grey bottles that combs festered in at the barber shop where my long curls were shorn, short, like American boys. And if these grey, accountant friends bothered talking to small boys at all, which most of them did not, they treated me as a nuisance at best, or worse, some kind of exotic pet. I resented them, and the grey pall they cast over my childhood.

As I got older, my tastes had moved to the left, as I discovered the amazing sounds of WFMU, an offbeat and unpredictable college radio station in New Jersey, which my radio set could only pick up at night, when the weather was good. WFMU played bizarre, intriguing, inscrutable music so enigmatic it made Dead Letters and Mexican Summers sound like Michael Jackson. As I hit puberty, I fell hopelessly in love. It was the only thing I wanted to do with my life; be around music. And being in a band seemed the shortcut to being around music.

My father, of course, disagreed. No Ashetons had ever played music, though my Mum made the case that actually her family, the Davies, had originally been Welsh, and had been said to be poets and wandering minstrels back in the dawn of time. The battle raged for most of the summer, as Mr Asheton Sr insisted that Daniel Jr settle down and accept the role that had been prepared for me, grooming me to take over Asheton Industrial Accounting when he retired. I had refused, digging in my heels and refusing to leave the apartment on Ludlow Street that I'd taken during my final year of University, drawn by the bars and clubs and rehearsal studios. Ludlow Street even smelled exciting, the occasional bursts of cooking smells wafting up from Little Italy or Chinatown, and blasts of industrial stink blowing over from the East River, mixed with the wafts of patchouli and nag champra from mouldering head shops. I even learned to live with the strange, unwashed lizard-junkie-sick smell from the open heroin market down on Rivington, though I carefully avoided the intersection with Clinton, even during daylight hours.

Living in the heart of it all, it was worth that persistent smell of piss in the 2nd Ave stop of the F train, that made commuting uptown almost unbearable during those long months of the summer vacation. But when I refused to budge, my father had also dug his heels in, and threatened to withdraw the parental funding which underwrote the lease on my apartment. Indeed, the lack of a Ludlow Street apartment would forfeit my place as the host of after-parties for all the bands that swirled around the scene, and with it, I would forfeit my uncanny radar for whatever was about to be the next big thing in music.

There was no way I was going to end up an accountant. Accountants held season box tickets at the Lincoln Center, sitting through endless tedious repetitions of the same four fucking Verdi and Mozart operas, every year for the rest of their stultified lives, until their dancing hips and their genitals calcified. Accountants did not go to achingly cool secret Musketeer Records showcases at CBGB's, or if they did, they were fucking laughed at, by Dieter and our mates. You could always tell the _Suits_ at East Village gigs, and by _Suits_ , I do not mean the elegantly tailored, close-fitting, three-button Ace Face pinstripe suits that I peacocked about in. I meant accountants' suits, baggy and grey and as shapeless as their miserable sex lives. Not that I had a sex life, at that point. Not yet! When my band _Made It_ , then, I knew, the world of women would open up to me like those sidewalk grates on Ludlow Street opened up to reveal dark, exciting cellars full of music and noise.

But, eventually, after my Mum's intervention, a bargain was struck. Asheton Sr had a word with a friend, who had a word with another friend, and so an apprenticeship place was found for me in the accounting department of the German conglomerate who had recently acquired Windlass Records. I was triumphant. I was going to work for a record company. It was the thing I had dreamed of, since high school, since those summer internships as a runner or a mailroom boy or whatever I could beg, borrow or scrape, either at indie labels desperate for a dogsbody, or bigger labels who wouldn't notice an extra kid hanging around. Rock labels, dance labels, once I'd even done a summer xeroxing press reviews for a jazz label. I didn't care; I just wanted to be close to the source of the music, understand how it worked, learn the ropes, the pitfalls, and understand the way the lifeblood coursed through the system. If accounting was my way in to the music business, then accounting it would be. None of my friends had to know that detail. They just had to know those magic words: Windlass Records.

True, Windlass was a Major Label, and was indeed now a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutsche Gramaphone International, its legendary founder, Sol Glass, having recently cashed out to enjoy his retirement in the Caribbean. But Old Sol had established a world-class A&R team that carried on his vision, and so long as the money kept coming in, DGI did not see any reason to kill the golden goose. Their strategy was genius, really - keeping an eye on European markets, which tended to be a few years ahead of American tastes, and signing big British and German artists just on the cusp of crossing over. Platinum records dating back to the British Invasion testified as to how successful this had been. But instead of just cashing out, Sol's stroke of genius was to get his A&R people to plough the money back into cultivating American talent, who were adroit at ripping off African-American music trends, and selling back a more palatable version to Europeans. He had struck big in the 70s with disco, then again in the 80s, as college radio giants like The Curse and Dead Letters crossed over one after another, and yet again at the cusp of the 90s, scouring little labels like SubPop and SST to cherrypick just the right bands to take advantage as grunge became a thing.

Let me get this straight: I _loathed_ grunge, with every fibre of my being. It was true, I'd started going to shows in the straight-edge DIY punk scene of the mid 80s, mostly because their fierce commitment to keeping things All Ages had allowed a young-looking teenager to access live music I'd never otherwise have experienced. (Hey, I still got carded buying beer in unfamiliar bars, even at the age of 23.) The energy of those hardcore bands knocked me out! But Grunge seemed to have sucked the energy - and the style - out of the music that I loved. I loathed the long stringy hair, and beards, and the flannel shirts of Grunge almost as much as I loved the sharp clothes and cool haircuts of the British post-punk bands Windlass had championed back in the 80s. Those terrible grunge bands, they dressed like the stoners who had made my life hell in the student lounge at Collegiate, and the music was even worse, sodden, lifeless and full of inarticulate groaning. I wanted bands that dressed like me and my arty, intellectual mates, sharp, cool and aesthetically aware, with sharp, pointed, incisive lyrics and even sharper guitar riffs. But trying to convince anyone outside our tiny cluster of mates on Ludlow St that this music was the future - even Windlass didn't seem to be interested any more. Without Sol to tell them to leapfrog ahead and spot the next fashion, DGI were perfectly happy to let them chase Grunge to whatever apotheosis it reached.

At first, I had keenly chased after the A&R guys like an over-enthusiastic puppy, but I soon realised that the company was highly stratified, and support staff simply did not talk to creatives - unless of course there was some outstanding bill that the creatives wanted paid. But still, I persisted, with steadily more desultory results. Harvey Wittenberg had slammed the door outright in my face and shouted at me to fuck off, while his secretary shrugged apologetically and told him me would be on the phone to Bono for the rest of the day. U fucking 2. I didn't know whether to be disgusted or excited. But one by one, I had experienced slammed doors and apologetic secretaries who still needed their expenses approved by us boys in accounting. Except Bebe Newcolm - she hadn't been in, so I'd just left a demo tape in the inbox where she expected her expense cheques. She had actually been nice to me, taking the time to return the tape.

"You're good-looking kids," Bebe had told me, and I actually blushed, though her solemnity had made it quite sure her interests were purely professional. "This guy - your singer?" One elegant red fingernail tapped the photo of Dieter on the cover, black shirt, white tie, hair slicked across his forehead like a member of Kraftwerk. "Good looking kid. He's got real star potential. But this music... I can't do a thing with this music in this climate. It's too restrained, too polite. Go out and... _live_ a little, Asheton. Take drugs, grow your hair, bang some girls, find out what life's really about."

I blushed even more, and thanked her for the advice, even while the other boys in the accounting department stared. Creatives never came down to the accounting department in person, they always sent their secretaries - especially not an A&R person as legendary as Bebe Newcolm.

"You're in a band?" asked my boss, Andre, a West Indian guy in his 30s who was always desperate to keep up with the latest trends in dance music, pouring over magazines, the only other person in the department who actually cared about music. But I just nodded sheepishly, afraid of being taken down a peg for bothering the creatives.

"Everyone here's in a band," snorted Sergei, the heavy-set Polish guy in accounts receivable. "Joe in the IT department is the lead guitarist in a heavy metal band, Edith up in catering is a soul singer, and Tim in the mailroom, he plays bass in a fucking ska band. Everyone here is in a band. Who cares about your shitty band."

"But not everyone here gets Bebe Newcolm's attention for their shitty demo tape," pointed out Pete, the younger man, almost my age, on the accounts payable desk. He made a sudden grab to seize the tape from me, but I held onto it, staring at our photo, trying to work out just how the rest of us could capitalise on Dieter's supposed "star quality". The photo stared back at me, my own dandified image and Dieter's, standing between two anonymous guys who could have filled in for any band in the East Village. Doyle was alright - Doyle could actually sing, unlike any of the rest of them, and his surreal poetry intrigued exactly the sort of arty East Village chicks with degrees in European Literature that I really wanted most to impress - with a decent haircut and better clothes, he would do. But Darin, with his plodding hi-hat and those ugly sweatbands he wore to every gig, would have to go. Darin wasn't really a friend, so it wouldn't be that difficult to sack him, but replacing him in a scene where there were 4 bands for every drummer? There was only one thing for it; I was going to have to poach a drummer from a friend's band.

But as I sat thinking, Pete in accounts receivable made another snatch for the tape, and I had to slap him off, the two of us threatening to break into a scuffle.

"Alright, enough. Back to work," barked Andre, who was really a pussycat when it came down to enforcing order, but Pete sloped back to his desk. "Asheton, once you've finished your expense forms today, you're going to need this." He dug around in the shelves above his desk, then produced an enormous file binder, and dumped it on my desk with a decisive thump.

Ugh. I slumped my shoulders back into my chair, and brought my spreadsheet up on the desktop, then picked up the binder, no doubt to continue entering a thousand other expense claims into my records; which was, to be fair, what they paid me to do. But as I opened the binder, expecting a riot of restaurant receipts and plane tickets, I saw instead a neatly typed index of record companies. And as I paged through the files - name, address, phone number, secretary of every A&R, manager and agent in New York City - I realised that this had nothing to do with my job. Looking up, I risked a glance at Andre, who winked back at me and cracked a smile. "I'll get right on this, sir."

 

\----------

 

In the evenings, I worked on my band's shitty image. I asked my NYU friends to find a photography student willing to work with us on the cheap, and got Dieter to agree to redesign the demo cover to feature the photos more prominently. Doyle required more subtle persuasion. He was of the notion that we should be as anonymous as possible, and not even feature our faces on their records, as an antidote to 'Image Bands'. After all, Dead Letters had never put their faces on their album covers. And he hadn't even known what Mexican Summers looked like until we'd seen them live at CBGBs. But Dieter, who disagreed with Doyle at every occasion, spat that he had no intention of every being in any group that _wasn't_ an "image band."

"Image isn't everything, it's the only thing," Dieter insisted. "Who the hell wants to be in a band that doesn't have a strong visual identity? Music is inherently tribal, and clothes are the first and foremost aspect of constructing the presentation of that tribe's entire lifestyle. It's just like high school cliques, but writ large and performed on a national scale. 

"I don't just want our fans to desire the band physically, though admittedly, that is, certainly a substantial part of our aim." Dieter's eyes flashed, like they always did, whenever anyone brought up sex. "I want our fans to crave the ability to inhabit the signifiers of our entire gestalt. I want to be in the kind of band that girls want to fuck, but boys would want to _be_ , to dress like, act like. I want our fans to seek out, and rep for the same books and films we reference in our liner notes and our videos. I want people to be _obsessed_ with us, and our whole world."

I was used to this kind of posturing. Dieter talked then just as he talks now - all _signifiers_ and _gestalt_ and _weltschmertz_ or whatever. I'd sat many times, trying to study, while Dieter had written out his plans for world domination in the back of composition books. If Dieter had had his way, he would have sat down and written out whole lists of bands, writers, artists and thinkers for our fans to become familiar with, as if he were preparing an entire school syllabus of _How To Be Dieter_.

"Smart artists know all this," Dieter carried on, stabbing at the air with his cigarette. "Smart artists know it never enough just to write good songs and play them well. It's not even enough just to look great in photos and videos. Smart artists have to cast themselves as the super-stars of their own private movies, and build a whole seductive stage set for our fans to wander around in, inviting them into our worlds. And smart artists have been doing this from the days of Bowie and Roxy Music, through Bauhaus and Duran Duran to..." Dieter reached for the latest issue of the NME, left casually in its spot of honour on my coffeetable. "Slur and Mirage."

"Come on, Mirage don't have an 'Image'," Doyle tried to argue. Doyle never learned not to argue with Dieter when he was on a tear. "They are a vision of authentic Northern English working class masculinity."

Dieter just smirked back at him and quoted Judith Butler, pointing out that 'authentic' heterosexual masculinity was the most carefully constructed image of them all. Dieter was like that, he always had an almost photographic memory and could spit back facts and quotes and chapter and verse, where Doyle was much more instinctual thinker, an ideas and concepts and stuttering out vague notions without really being able to back them up kind of guy.

"What are you even doing, quoting Judith Butler, man?" Doyle sputtered.

"Do you even know who Judith Butler is?" Dieter sneered.

"I know who she is. She's a feminist theorist. Why the fuck are you, of all people, quoting feminist theory? You're hardly a feminist."

"Of course I'm a feminist!" Dieter seemed almost outraged that this might even be called into question. "Discovering feminism was the best thing that ever happened to my sex life. I love feminist girls." Here, he lowered his voice to a surreal whisper specifically designed to irritate Doyle. "Feminist girls like to go on top."

And I sat in the middle, feeling torn. Dieter and Doyle were both, in their own ways, my very best friends, but they had loathed each other on sight, and never quite settled into any balance, pulling me back and forth each way between them. I'd known Doyle since he was a teenager. We'd both been born abroad, me in London and Doyle in Lisbon to a British family, and both of us had struggled with our ex-pat parents. "Third Culture Kids," Doyle had declared us, never quite belonging either to our original cultures or our new host countries. I had tried hard to lose my accent, and completely succeeded, unless very drunk, but Doyle's accent often wandered all over the map. Occasionally he even forget English words, and slipped into French or Spanish or German without thinking, halfway through a conversation. He spoke English like a second language sometimes, but I always thought that was what made his poetry so unforgettable.

We'd both attended the The Collegiate School together on the Upper West Side for a year and a half, united by our mutual love of early Dead Letters and our hatred of German grammar, until Doyle's family moved again, and he was shuttled off to yet another American School abroad. We'd caught up again a few summers later, when we both found ourselves at an immersive language program in Germany, and escaped the dormitories at night to go and try our hesitant grammar sneaking into the nightclubs of West Berlin. Doyle, with his sad, deep blue eyes and his floppy blond hair, had sharpened his fluency by flirting with girls, while I had hung back, wide-eyed and wider-eared at the music they were still playing there, Nick Cave, Crime and the City Solution, Neubauten. When I returned to the States to start University, I was convinced that being in a band was the only thing I wanted to do with my life.

So when Doyle reappeared, adrift, back in New York, halfway through my junior year at University, I had let him stay on my sofa until Doyle's French girlfriend found an apartment, then bullied him into singing for our band. The last thing Doyle wanted to be was a rock star, though he drifted back and forth between wanting to be a painter or a poet.  It was Doyle's girlfriend, Effie, who wanted him to be a rock star, because she thought a rock star would make a better boyfriend for her aspiring modelling career than a feckless unemployed writer. I, uh, OK, maybe I pushed a little? Doyle didn't take much pushing if you knew how to flatter him.

Tall, blond, tanned, broad-shouldered and chiselled looking, Doyle brought out some atavistic hatred in the fey, slender and pallid Dieter, who always looked as if he had slept in a coffin somewhere and only risen to suck young maidens' blood. But as handsome as Doyle was, he always seemed to look slightly wrong, wearing his blond hair shoulder length, like Kurt from Nirvana, way after Kurt's death, and long hair had stopped being cool and just started signifying 'suburban burnout loser'. His clothes were all over the place, as if he didn't quite know how to dress himself, bizarrely mismatched, but of exceptionally good quality. He had one pair of good black trousers, perfectly tailored to show off his slim hips, which Dieter immediately spotted as Dior Homme, but he matched them with an ugly black and blue checked shirt that turned out on closer inspection to be next season's Helmut Lang.

"Oh, it's Effie," Doyle shrugged when I tentatively raised the issue of his _look_. "She picks them up for free at the big fashion shows in Paris. Apparently I exactly fit the standard sample size for menswear. Free clothes? I just figure, hey, lucky me."

Doyle was not into the idea of having a _look_ , though I guess he went along with it just to please me, really. There was no way he was ever going to wear Dieter's European military uniforms, or my mod suits, but he came to some compromise, dressing like an insouciant schoolboy onstage. Doyle wanted to be more anonymous, a cipher, as if anyone with that face like a Greek God could possibly be anonymous. He said he didn't feel like any of those shallow scene assholes deserved to be able to _type_ him, just by looking at his clothes, or seeing what band logo he had on his T-shirt.

And yet, the moment that Doyle had walked into our rehearsal room and started to sing in his deep, resonant baritone voice, our band had emerged fully-formed. I wrote the music for the songs before Doyle wrote any of the lyrics, so I was the lead guitarist; that was always the deal. But Doyle and Dieter argued back and forth, for nearly a year. Doyle was by far the better bassist, but he could not sing and play bass at the same time, so he moved onto rhythm guitar and Dieter picked up the bass. But Dieter didn't want to play bass, he wanted to be the frontman. So his riffs grew showier and more like lead guitar licks, as his antics grew more attention-seeking, lowering his bass strap until it was banging about his knees, as if he was constantly trying to upstage Doyle. Doyle, by contrast, grew more and more impassive, his face like granite, his hips and shoulders immobile as he stared out into the mid distance, Dieter dancing around behind him like a marionette with his strings cut, limbs flailing and bass churning, and only making Doyle look more cool by comparison. I had put the band together very carefully, selecting musicians as much for their sensibilities and their personal philosophies as for their chops. And in my heart, I knew that it was the tension between Dieter and Doyle that would eventually make us really interesting - if we could ever get good enough at the music side of things.

We played a couple of gigs here and there, the Spiral, the Pyramid Club, just playing shitty shows at shitty hours to learn the ropes and get _good_. The Spiral and The Pyramid Club were the only two venues in NYC that actually advertised their bookings phone number in their Village Voice ads, and consequentially, they ended up letting absolutely anyone play. Even us, a nameless band from the East Village, who had a drum machine instead of a drummer for our first 2 gigs.

The Spiral was just unspeakably dire, a total rip-off, aimed only at exploiting new bands keen to play their first gig in New York. You could smell it from the sidewalk, the stench of dry ice, desperation and that super-strong aquanette hairspray that goth bands used. Their management were notorious for selling wads of advance tickets to unsuspecting bands, which they were expected to sell on if they wanted to make any kind of profit, or else face paying for the privilege of playing to an empty room. We were lucky when we were still at NYU, in that we had a built-in audience who came to our shows through friendship and loyalty, but The Spiral was the kind of place that piled on 6 bands in a night, and no matter how many people you brought down, you could easily find yourself going on at 3 am to a handful of drunks. It had an excessive cover charge if you didn't have one of the advance tickets, their drinks were expensive and watered-down, and the sound system was so blown-out it was almost impossible to hear our vocals in the monitors over the roar of the guitars, so god help you if you had to sing over a drumkit. But getting ripped off by The Spiral was almost a rite of passage for young New York bands.

The Pyramid Club was a whole other kettle of fish, a legendary venue fallen on hard times, which had an indie-rock venue on one floor, and a Drag Revue bar on the other. It was also a rite of passage, for bands to run the gauntlet of drag queens who came to pass judgement on the new talent as they smoked in the hall. "Looking good, salary man, work it!" they called at me as I slouched by. "Woo-wee, little sister, nice face, but you're not even trying with those threads," they dismissed Doyle. And when Dieter appeared, bringing up the rear, they almost exploded with excitement. "Liza Man-elli! Get your silicone butt up here, sister, we have a German Stormtrooper for your Cabaret routine."

Dieter raised one exquisitely plucked eyebrow in curiosity as he tried to peer down the stairs to the Drag Queens' domain, but I shot him a dirty look. "Don't you fucking dare. We have a soundcheck to get through!"

Doyle was about to rest his gig bag beside him, but then abruptly changed his mind. "Does this floor feel OK to you?" he asked, shifting his weight from side to side. I tried to raise my foot, but yeah. The floor was... oddly sticky, and my Chelsea Boots clung to it alarmingly. Without the blast of the air conditioner, the stench of spilled beer and cigarette ash was almost unbearable, and I did not want to even know what was up with that carpet. So we arranged our amps in a pile and heaped our guitars on top to try and keep them even remotely clean.

Of course our drummer - borrowed from a band we'd met at the Spiral gigs - was late, coming over from another gig in a taxi, as all drummers in New York seemed to play in two or three bands at once. And one of the other bands had a diva fit over the lack of vocals in the monitors, so we completely missed our soundcheck, and then to make matters worse, Dieter went missing. For fucks sake, if he was downstairs bothering the drag queens... If he didn't appear in the next ten minutes, as me and Doyle set up, we were going to miss not just our soundcheck but possibly our entire set, which had already been cut from half an hour to twenty-five minutes due to the first two bands' shenanigans.

At the last possible moment, Dieter re-appeared from downstairs, grinning widely, his face covered in lipstick, and shedding feathers, as if from a feather boa, from his neck and shoulders. He picked up his bass without even tuning it, plugged into the DI box with an ear-popping squeal, and off we went, completely out of tune for the first three songs, until I made the whole band stop and re-tune, costing us another five minutes. Ten dollars for the flyers, thirty dollars for various cabs, and god only knew how much money in rehearsal fees for that dank room underneath Ludlow Street... was it really worth it for 20 minutes onstage on a Wednesday night at the Pyramid Club?

But the moment that I flicked my amp back from standby, and stomped on my distortion pedal, and felt the noise from my electric guitar go up my spine like a jolt of energy, I knew: yes it was fucking worth it. It was the only thing in my fucking life that was worth it. Even if the wiring onstage was completely shot, and I was plugged into a power strip that was plugged into an ugly tangle of electrical cables held together with tape and rainwater, and my microphone was giving off so many shocks that I would probably never need to shave under my lower lip again.

We graduated from the dire Spiral and the potentially lethal Pyramid Club to a Monday night showcase at Brownie's. At this gig, my older sister and a couple of her fashion mag friends came to see us out of familial loyalty, and I saw how they reacted once the new line-up started to play. The girls been standing at the back, drinking and gossiping, but suddenly, once the music started, they'd just been drawn towards the stage, with a power that none of my former groups had ever had.

"God, I can't work out which one of them I fancy more," Pricilla had told me during the cab ride home. "They're like night and day, but somehow they only work to make each other more beautiful. Is that really Doyle? Doyle Saunders that you used to go to school with?"

"That's really Doyle."

"Christ, I've seen him in swimming trunks on the Vineyard. He never looked like that then... and your pal Dieter, wow, those cheekbones! I would not mind some of..."

"Pricilla!" I blurted out. "Don't even think about it. You don't know where he's been."

"I'd like to find out though," my sister mused, her eyes wide.

The next rehearsal, I told both Doyle and Dieter that if either of them ever went near my sister, they were not only sacked, but I would personally cut their balls off. But still, I noted their effect on female members of the audience, and pushed them both to dress up _more_ , their smart clothes and cool haircuts in stubborn opposition to the grunge hoards that were raging around them.

We recorded another demo, in that dingy basement studio underneath the Pink Pony, with Darin struggling to keep up with the click track, and Doyle and I struggling to overdub decent vocal takes on top of the backing tracks we'd recorded all in a single tumbled rush. The engineer never quite scrubbed the tracks clear of the original scratch vocal, bleeding through in the background like a ghost, but Doyle decided he liked it that way, mumbling against himself like he was having a conversation with his own conscience. 

Pricilla found a friend to "style" us properly, gelling our hair and nipping in our suits with pins to get them to fit more closely. I thought we looked kinda scrawny and thin, but Pris said no. We should show off our hungry late-adolescent bodies. The whole point was to get us to look smart, and sharp, and most of all, sexually _available_. Then we did a real promotional shoot, not against a brick wall like every other band in the East Village, but "on location" in a posh pre-war apartment that Pricilla had scouted out for her magazine. The look we were supposed to be going for was jaded posh boys, aristocratic, debauched, but louche and _up for it_. The photographer, nervous about her first big Vogue shoot, was already there, setting up lights and taking readings on her meter, the morning before the shoot. So I slipped her a discreet roll of twenties to cover her darkroom expenses, and me and the boys shot a couple of rolls of "test prints" for her, which looked a thousand times better than the grainy photo that had formed the cover of our last demo.

After the shoot, Dieter had tried it on lazily with my sister, but I shot him such a look of warning that he sloped off and ended up going home with an agent from a modelling company. (And two weeks later, Dieter started picking up cash doing catwalk work for menswear labels. Dieter was just fucking _like_ that, the jammy bastard.)

 

\----------

 

With a better demo and a better promo photo and having survived the Monday night free-for-all, our bookings started to get better. The Spiral and the Pyramid Club gave way to opening slots for decent bands at Nightingale's and Brownie's. We still hadn't quite settled on a name, though. We had been playing under the dubious moniker "4D" - which, honestly, as terrible as it was, was still better than the absurd suggestions Dieter had been tossing about - until we started getting confused with a hip-hop artist already working under that name. Everything Dieter came up with made us cringe. Lingerie? Four In Film? Doyle had practically recoiled in horror. At the moment, we were Kiss You In Paris, which we all loathed, but all of us still loved watching that banned Madonna video over and over again. It was sexy, and European, and a bit risqué, and that was the vibe we wanted, but god it looked terrible on the bill and it made me cringe every time I had to mention it to someone outside the band.

But A&R people - not at Windlass, of course, but other, smaller, _indie_ labels - were starting to call me back about that demo, and were starting to ask for guest list places. That said, there was still confusion about the name. No, I explained for the umpteenth time, Kiss You In Paris was the name of the band; Metropolis was what we'd called the E.P, named after the elegiac, half speed, Post-Punk-tinged Kraftwerk cover we'd done for the final track.

"That's a shame," Bebe Newcolm had said, when I scraped up the courage to show it to her. "Metropolis is a great name for a band. It's urban, sophisticated, European, will make people think of the Fritz Lang film. You guys _look_ like a Metropolis. You guys do not look like a Kiss Me In Paris. That's some Sixpence None The Richer shit. Get rid of it, if you want my advice, which you obviously do or you'd have just reimbursed my flight to LA from downstairs." This, with a pointed glance over her chic frameless glasses. I apologised, supplied the cheque, and took off. "Don't forget your CD..." she called after me, and I shyly collected that, too. Bebe Newcolm was never going to sign my band, no matter how great she now thought Dieter and Doyle looked.

And so we become Metropolis. None of them complained when I brought it up at rehearsal. Doyle rolled it around his mouth a few times, singing it like he sung the Kraftwerk cover, then nodded. "It's a good name. Short. Distinctive."

Dieter posed against his bass amp. "Of course it's completely obvious. I knew we were going to call ourselves that from the time I suggested we cover the song, but of course, none of you ever listen to my suggestions."

I was about to open his mouth and complain that they seemed to do nothing but listen to Dieter's suggestions - in fact, Kiss You In Paris had been one of Dieter's suggestions - but then wisely changed my mind. I had another bombshell to drop, even better than Bebe Newcolm's suggested new name. "By the way, I've got some exciting news about our gig at the Lacuna Lounge next Friday."

"We're headlining now?" Dieter's head perked up.

"We're not headlining," I sighed. "And anyway, who wants to headline there, with only two bands, you end up having to play for over an hour. The good news is, Barry Michaels has said he's coming down." Then I grinned and waited for the reaction to my stunning coup.

"Who the fuck is Barry Michaels?" Doyle shrugged, utterly disinterested, as he cracked another bottle of corona.

"Oh my god, you don't know who Barry Michaels is," Dieter tutted, helping himself to the last corona in our 6-pack.  "How are you even born."

I reached for another beer, but there were none left. Why did I always sink the money into providing the 6-pack, when I never got more than 1 bottle? 6 bottles, 4 guys, why was it always Doyle and Dieter who got the most beers when they paid the least? 

So instead I started to explain the importance of our guest. "Barry Michaels is, like, the super-producer who has launched the careers of all sorts of artists..." I rattled off the names of a few of the more famous pop and R&B singers, as Doyle looked increasingly baffled. "As well as producing comeback albums for..." Another list of more established rock bands, at which Doyle did actually start to look more impressed. Barry Michaels had single-handedly redefined college radio stalwarts Dead Letters' sound in the early 90s, and Dead Letters were one of Doyle's all-time favourite bands. "When he decides he wants to work with a new artist, he basically hand-picks the label he thinks they should work with, and they... just sign them. Just like that."

"So why on earth would the guy who discovered..." Dieter wrinkled up his nose to show his contempt. "...Cindy Birdweather want to work with... _us_."

"I like Cindy Birdweather," Doyle asserted, just to get up Dieter's wrinkled nose. "I love that song, you know, the one that goes.. _Girls_! _Girls_! That's a great tune. Maybe we could cover it at the gig, get his attention." This with a subtle smirk in my direction that made me realise that yes, he was actually taking the piss as well.

I smiled diplomatically, and blushed. It was one of my most frustrating personal habits; that whenever I got angry, my face flushed, so that I didn't look angry, I just looked embarrassed and apologetic. My bandmates, the closest thing to work they ever did was stand around smoking and looking good at gigs, and people flocked to them - women, other musicians, club promoters. They had no idea how much _effort_ it took trying to negotiate the waters of the music industry. Sure, Dieter might know - and had probably shagged - every person on Ludlow Street, but in terms of getting ahead, getting a deal, getting signed, and moving up to the Next Level, neither of them had a clue how super-intense and _time_ -consuming it all was. Dieter and Doyle might well have been happy to shuffle back and forth between playing scenester shows at Don Hill's and Coney Island High for the rest of their 20s, but I was in a hurry to Get On. I had a deadline, with my father, of how long I was allowed to muck about on Ludlow Street before I had to have something to show for my efforts, or face being drafted into the family firm, laced into the premature death of accountancy and that Lincoln Centre box seat - and they did not. 

Doyle would drift, and probably end up marrying his model and being supported the rest of his life. And Dieter... well, Dieter would carry on DJ-ing and occasionally modelling and being photographed in edgy British style magazines that came over to do trend pieces on the new scene on the Lower East Side, or whatever the fuck Dieter actually _did_ for a living, until he moved to Berlin and died of a drug overdose. But I had until the age of 25 to put out a record, or become a fucking accountant, just like my dad and his dad before him. 1997 - and my dreaded 25th birthday - might be two years away yet, but I could feel it breathing down my neck. And two years might have been forever in the endless drug-fuelled nights of the Lower East Side, but in the music industry, it was the blink of an eye.


	3. Down Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the newly christened Metropolis play at the Lacuna Lounge, supporting the hotly tipped local band, Down Time.
> 
> Can Daniel hold his band together long enough to impress super-producer Barry Michaels? And can he keep his rapacious bandmates in check long enough to stand a chance with the girl of his dreams?

The Lacuna Lounge always was my favourite venue in those days, and not just because it was practically across the street from my tiny, subdivided studio apartment. It was easy to miss, a blocky, one-story shopfront hunkered down between two tall tenements, a literal lacuna, an absence in the skyline, rather than a presence. There was no sign, no branding, except a small logo engraved on the glass of the front doors, which were normally covered over with band flyers anyway. In the busy, try-hard whirl of Ludlow Street, the Bridge and Tunnel crowd were distracted by the bright window displays of The Pink Pony and Max Fish. Max Fish, with its gallery-like atmosphere and its pop art displays, drew the art fags and the poseurs. The Lacuna Lounge, with its exposed ducts and its plain, almost industrial decor, drew the musicians, and Charlene, its manager, encouraged all us local scene bands to treat it as our second home, letting us rehearse cheaply in the basement downstairs, and giving us decent gigs and sometimes even free drinks.

I had known Charlene for years, back before she'd opened her own bar, when she'd still done bookings at Brownie's. I kinda suspected she had a bit of a soft spot for this obsessive but underage boy who used to come over and pester her to tell me all about the obscure support bands, as well as the legendary headliners. In return for nurturing local talent, she inspired an almost maternal devotion from all the bands in the scene. I, and pretty much everyone who was anyone on the Lower East Side used its front bar as a kind of musical telegraph to transmit and receive information about our bands.

I arrived first at the venue, just as the doors were being unlocked. I always did, even if it meant taking the afternoon off work, unpaid. It wasn't just that I worried about arranging equipment swaps with the other bands and schmoozing the soundman to get a decent mix, it was more that I needed to hang around and get the vibe of the venue, feel out the other bands as competition and absorb every tiny piece of information about the state of the New York City music scene at that moment. The Lacuna Lounge had clearly not got the information about our name change in time enough to alter their promotional material, so the poster on the door declared "THE DOWN TIME; KISS YOU IN PARIS." The Down Time? Now that was a bad name. But I was trying to cadge a bass amp and a drum kit off them, so I had best not be rude. I begged a small bottle of sparkling water off Erland, the bartender, and sat down to wait. It was at the end of the dead first week of January, when people were tired and burned out from Christmas and New Years partying, but not quite ready to give up the holiday spirit, so it might be either really dead or really packed, depending on the weather, depending on people's moods or hangovers or whatever. There was no way of knowing.

After about half an hour, a van rolled up outside, and parked up on the curb like it was going to unload. I went outside and introduced myself to the nervous driver - a small, skinny, pale kid with a shaved head and a close-cropped gingery goatee, who turned out to be named Elishsa - and offered a hand unloading.

"The rest of my band should be here in a moment," Elisha insisted. "We need someone to watch the van."

"I'll watch the van while you take something in, then you watch the van while I take something in," I suggested helpfully.

"We need two people for the bass cabinet." Elisha crossed his arms over his chest defensively.

"Well, let's get started on the drum kit." Reaching into the van, I came up with the case for a snare drum, and jauntily carried it into the back room before returning for more.

"But who's going to watch the stuff in the venue?" Elisha protested, panicking slightly. And I thought I got nervous before gigs.

"Don't worry, the bartender's here. Erland won't let anyone else through before the gig." Reassured, Elisha picked up a keyboard case and sloped off into the back room while I peered into the van to check out what else they had that Metropolis might be able to borrow.

I heard the noise of an engine right behind me, felt a rush of air, and almost instinctively jumped back, just as a scooter came careening up onto the sidewalk, loaded with two passengers. Although I'd been about to shout and give the driver a piece of my mind for nearly running me down, I suddenly stopped. The rear passenger had climbed off the back of the bike - a lovely old fashioned Vespa with about half a dozen too many shiny chrome mirrors - and was stretching her long limbs and shaking her silky blonde hair out of her helmet. I felt like I'd been punched in the solar plexus, though really, it was probably just the shock of nearly being killed in a traffic accident. Because the passenger was That Girl, the girl from The Pink Pony, the girl who wore costumes, though today she was dressed as a mod, in a Fred Perry shirt-dress, a thigh-length white leather coat, and those knee high white boots.

The driver of the scooter parked it up, locked it, and unfolded himself from his seat, tossing both helmets into the van. He was also tall, very skinny and strikingly handsome, though his skin was as dark as costume girl's was fair. They made a striking couple, and I felt myself twitch slightly with envy, eyeing the mod boy and casting my practised eye over his perfect fade haircut, classic 70s era adidas, and a green, striped track suit top over his drainpipe jeans but under his parka. That Girl hadn't even noticed me, she was pointing at the poster on the door, and both of them were giggling. I couldn't help but suppress a faint whisper of pride - these kids were cool. They were exactly the sort of audience I had always imagined that Metropolis should belong to. Their clothes, their haircuts, their drop-dead attitude just showed that they _got it_. That they might hold the keys to the magical kingdom of aesthetic acceptance that I had been craving since I was 10. Metropolis was the right thing to be doing, if it brought people like this into my world.

But abruptly, the small nervous bald kid reappeared and started haranguing the pair of them. "Where have you two been? It does not take that long to get here from Chelsea." With that, my dreams burst, and I realised that this was the band we would be supporting.

"We got lost," the girl giggled. Again, that slight hint of an accent, exotic, exciting, and yet completely familiar.

Elisha frowned, and the taller lad's face cracked in a sheepish smile. "I cannot tell a lie. Mary made us stop and get ice cream." He also had a British accent, stronger, more pronounced than hers, though his voice was much softer.

"Ooh, Gabe, you liar," the girl - Mary? - laughed, and hit him playfully on the arm. Were they a couple, or weren't they? "I like this," she giggled, pointing at the poster.

"I can't believe that," Elisha hissed, thumping the poster with one finger. "Gabe, did you do this?"

"No... but I like it. The Down Time. It sounds cool, like an old mod band."

"We are Down Time. Just Down Time. Not The Down Time. ' _The_ ' bands are out. Nobody has a ' _the_ ' any more," Elisha insisted, fuming. "This is such a fuck-up."

"It's not that big a deal, Elisha," Mary countered. "I like it. It sounds exciting. The Down Time Kiss You In Paris. Mmmm, now who will I be kissing in Paris?" Her eyes flickered back and forth between her bandmates, both of whom looked suddenly doubtful and slightly long-suffering. "Well, obviously neither of _you_!"

I felt my heart suddenly lighten, as her gaze slipped over them, and came to rest, lightly, on me. So they were not a couple. I didn't know why this relieved me so much, but I felt a burst of courage. Well, now this was a good a time as any to introduce myself, but I fumbled it badly. "I'll be... in... I'm Kissing You In Paris, tonight."

"Are you, now?" Her eyes almost danced with mirth as her lips turned up in a saucy smile that just about melted me.

My face flushed, but not with anger this time. "I mean, that's my band. Kiss You In Paris. Except, well, we're not called Kiss You In Paris any more, we're called Metropolis now." Her eyes didn't leave me. I felt slightly electrified, rooted to the spot, unable to move while she was staring at me with those amused eyes.

"Me-tro-pol-is..." she started to sing, softly, and with a slightly burred voice that stretched out the vowels, much sexier than Doyle had ever sung it.

"Well, if they got both our bands' names wrong, you won't mind if I get rid of this," interrupted Elisha, moving round to the other side of the door and tearing down the poster, neatly ripping it in two.

Finally, the girl broke her gaze, and glared at her bandmate. "Elisha..."

"No. This is not on. I'm going to get them to print another one, with the right names." With this, he turned on his heel and stalked off back into the bar.

"Gabe, you better go with him, make sure he doesn't piss anyone off," she sighed sweetly, and the other man followed, leaving her and me alone outside on the sidewalk. When she looked back at me, her eyes were slightly apologetic. "I'm sorry, he gets like this before gigs. He doesn't mean any harm. He's just nervous."

"I completely understand," I commiserated. "I thought my nerves were bad..." I hoped that I wasn't staring at her too obviously, but she kept staring right back, as if she were taking the measure of me.

"Are you excited for the gig, though?" she finally asked, as her lips spilled open into a grin, the enthusiasm she seemed to be trying to hide so infectious that I couldn't help but join in.

"Stoked," I confessed. Or at least, I sure was now. "Super-stoked." Smooth, Asheton, smooth. What are you, 12?

She laughed, and nodded, then gestured with her head back towards the van. "We should work out... like, if we can share any backline? We brought bass cabinet and drum kit, if you want to use any of it..."

I suddenly remembered exactly what I was meant to be asking. And I was meant to be the organised one out of my band? "Oh. Yes, of course, that's exactly what I mean to ask you. Bass cab and kit would be perfect. Do you want to borrow any of our guitar amps?"

"We don't have a guitarist," she shrugged, climbing up into the van and manoeuvring the bass cab into place to be lifted down then wheeled out. To my surprised expression, she added "Elisha doesn't believe in them. String-twanging gits, as far as he's concerned."

"So he sings, and..." I thought of the instrument Elisha had cradled as he walked through into the bar. "...plays keyboards?" 

Mary nodded. "Give us a hand with this?" She was stronger than she looked; I barely had to guide the massive cabinet as we moved it down out of the van.

"Well, you play bass, obviously." Our eyes met, and I saw her smile with recognition.

"You've got a good memory."

"You're kinda hard to forget."

She beamed at that, though she was still three feet above me in the van. "You're so cute. The way you'd stare with your eyes on stalks, but you'd never talk."

Hot damn! There, now I was blushing properly, feeling the red flush creeping all the way down my neck and across my chest. "I..." I started to stutter, as she crouched down to look into my face, but then there was the noisy clatter of her bandmates returning and I quickly turned away and tried to compose myself.

But Gabe had seen - the look of interest on both our faces, the blush on my cheeks, the spark in her eyes - and started to sing "Mary, Mary, where you going to?"

"Hush, you," laughed Mary and hopped down out of the van to knock him upside the head, and her flirtation was diverted onto safer territory. It was so obvious they were not a couple now, the way they bickered and teased one another, more like siblings. As they shouldered the bass cabinet between them, I could hear her trying to set him up with various girls of her acquaintance, and him discussing the possibilities with more or less relish. Elisha was staring at me with that customary hostility again, so I made myself useful by picking up a floor tom and carrying it through into the bar.

As The Down Time set up their gear for soundcheck, I disappeared off to make a phone call, to ring Dieter and tell him and Darin to bring the guitar amps, but not the rhythm section's backline. Then I left a message with Barry Michaels' secretary confirming the address of the venue, rang a few more friends to remind them of the gig, and by the time I was done, I turned to see the rest of my band struggling up the street. Doyle and Darin, of course, were struggling with the heavy guitar amps, while Dieter sauntered along with just his bass case and Darin's cymbal bag, the lazy sod.

I stood with them as they finished their cigarettes outside, bursting with the news of wanting to tell them about the girl, but then stopped myself just in time. Really, I felt like I wanted to preserve the fantasy that she might actually like _me_ , even with these two in view, just a little longer. And of course, as soon as we carried our gear through to catch the tail end of the soundcheck, I could see both Doyle and Dieter clock her, at exactly the same moment. She was standing up there, holding what looked like a guitar, but I immediately recognised as a Fender VI bass. I was impressed; those things were a monster to play, neck like a baseball bat. But Doyle and Dieter were both just staring at the girl, Doyle standing up a little bit straighter and sulkily examining her through his long bangs, while Dieter preened and arched his skinny back, making the most of the two scant inches of height he had on Doyle. The two of them towered over me - heck, even the girl towered over me, in her stack-heeled go-go boots. I was never going to be able to compete.

I felt almost sick - and with actual jealousy rather than nerves - as their soundcheck finished and Dieter made his way up onto the small stage to talk to Mary about the amp. I saw Dieter lean in closer, invading girls' personal space the way he always did, one hand gently placed on the small of her back. And then, to my surprise, I saw Mary actually physically recoil, seize his hand by the wrist, and hand it gingerly back to him as if it were a rotting fish. I could not hear what Mary said to him, but from the shocked look on Dieter's face, I didn't imagine it was pleasant. And suddenly, I was very, very glad that I had never actually hit on that girl, no matter how cute or friendly she seemed.

Doyle didn't actually make a move; he rarely did. It was more his style to hang around, looking beautiful and poetic and grumpy, elbows leant back on the bar, his slender hips thrust forward, staring sulkily at girls until they came to him. Mary didn't come near him; she stowed her bass and her pedalboard, then went over to try to calm Elisha, who seemed to be almost humming with nerves, even after a successful soundcheck.

"It'll be fine. Soundcheck was flawless," she assured him.

"That's what I'm afraid of. Good soundcheck, bad show," he muttered. "Is Mandy here yet with the light show?"

"Don't be silly. Let's get some dinner and then, well... we'll find a place to change clothes, and then the doors will be open and it'll go off like clockwork. Mandy said she'd be here at 9. It'll be fine." She craned her neck and looked around, but there wasn't really any kind of backstage at the Lacuna Lounge. There was just the soundman's booth and that was it.

I suddenly spied my chance, and stopped by them as I carried his guitar towards the stage. "Do you need somewhere to change?" I offered. "I'm sorry, I wasn't eavesdropping or anything, but, um, I just wanted to tell you, I do live just across the street..."

"Actually, I know," she giggled lightly, with a tone that made me wonder if she had ever watched me as much as I had watched her. "I would just change in the loo, after all, the wallpaper is... erm, interesting, in there." I knew that the men's room was wallpapered in pages from 1950s girlie mags, but I hadn't a clue what the women's was like. Gay porn and naked men? "But I need a full length mirror."

"If you needed somewhere to change, my place would be no problem. It's super-convenient. We usually get takeaway and go over there, smoke a bowl before we go on, so if you wanted to...?" I let my voice trail off, fearing the kind of sharp retort that had sent Dieter sulking.

She glanced at Elisha, who was rolling his eyes already. "Can I bring my bandmates?"

"Sure, yeah. You're all welcome. Come over as soon as our soundcheck is done."

Well, it gave me something to be nervous about. More nervous than either the gig, or Barry Michaels turning up - or not turning up, which might be even more nerve wracking still. It was ridiculous, I knew it. The Down Time didn't even stay to watch Metropolis' soundcheck, they retired to the other room to plan setlists or phone their own friends to remind them of the gig, or whatever it was bands did while waiting. I focused on the strings of my guitar and tried not to think of any of it. But soundcheck was work, and not release. Testing the tone of my guitar, checking the level of my pedals, songs started, got halfway through, and then abandoned because Doyle wanted to check another bit. I didn't lose myself at soundcheck. I didn't throw my head back and chuck myself around and dance like I had no cares in the world. And all the time, I felt conscious of eyes upon me, even though I knew that she was not there. Until the soundcheck ended, and I looked up, and there she was, standing against the back wall, her arms folded behind her back as she gazed at me as if she was trying to make up her mind about something.

I felt oddly crushed. She said nothing to me about my band, my music, how cool I must have looked up there. She just walked over to the stage and peered at my pedalboard. "Is that a Big Muff?" she asked, without a hint of guile.

"Yes," I stuttered, wondering whether I would be insulting her or not by explaining my choice in distortion pedals, and how the unpredictable old effects units affected my guitar volume, so I used the Big Muff for my big explosive solos, but relied on an MXR for everyday fuzz.

"Cool, I've got one of those," she said, and nodded curtly, and that was the end of it. For fucks sake, the one girl in the world I wanted to impress most, with my guitar, with my band, with my intimate knowledge of the Ludlow Street scene, and she seemed utterly, completely unimpressed.

And then suddenly everyone was in my apartment, and it was full of people and smoke and the smell of chinese takeaway, though the thought of eating on a gig night, really it made me want to be sick. Doyle and Dieter had insisted on coming with us, though Darin had stayed to watch the gear (and quietly get drunk on the band's tiny rider before any of them got a look in, knowing Darin). Up four flights of perilously tilting staircases, I had led them all, then down that weird-ass long, twisted hallway of mine, that normally functioned as a storeroom for all our gear, and into my tiny studio flat. Mary had immediately locked herself in the bathroom to change, while Gabe and Elisha took the narrow galley kitchen, which was the only other room with a door. Doyle and Dieter sat on the sofa and played music and squabbled, while I sat on one of the two windowsills opposite and stared out at my inspiring view of the pitched rooftop next door. Doyle and Dieter really did my head in when they were like this, and what made was worse was that I knew, this wasn't really about the girl at all.

Dieter slept with women like it was a sport; that was just the way Dieter was. I didn't understand why the women put up with it, but it was like it was a game for him. Dieter fucked around casually, almost matter-of-factly, usually seeing several women at the same time, playing them off against one another, setting up scenes and confrontations between them quite deliberately. He'd invite two women he was concurrently sleeping with to the same gig at the same time, almost to see if they'd fight over him - and if they wouldn't, he'd leave both of them and go off with a third. I just did not get why the women of New York City did not just wise up to Dieter's antics, compare notes, and kick him collectively to the curb. It seemed impossible to me that the girls of NYC could really be that stupid, but maybe Dieter was just lucky.

But Doyle, Doyle _wasn't_ like that. When his French girlfriend was in town on some modelling assignment, Doyle was the very picture of an attentive and devoted boyfriend. But when she wasn't, well, Dieter was a bad influence. Because Doyle had a competitive streak a mile long. He'd played basketball at school, and earned endless medals on the swim team. Even that summer that Pricilla had mentioned, when we'd taken Doyle with us for two weeks at our summer house on the Vineyard, Doyle could not resist swimming back and forth, out to the spit and back, either pitting himself against other kids, or just trying to outdo his personal best. And when Doyle saw Dieter fucking scenester girls like it was an Olympic event, well, Doyle could not resist a competition.

Gabe and Elisha had emerged, both of them dressed all in white, Elisha in what looked like a wedding suit, complete with white waistcoat and white tie, and Gabe in casual white slacks and a fitted white polo shirt. Sitting across from them, stoned out of their gourds, Dieter and Doyle were both all in black, Dieter looking even more like a sinister nazi in his military get-up, in comparison with the angelic looking Down Time boys. Even stone cold sober, it would have been weird, the five of us sitting in silence, but as they passed the joint over to Elisha, and we all got stoned, it was almost unbearable. Dieter and Elisha were staring at each other, both their faces darkening, as the first Velvet Underground album seemed to grow more and more dissonant in the background. The look on Elisha's face was unmistakable, and as he glared at Dieter's uniform, the epaulettes, the white armband, the white tie, the military belt buckle - oh christ, let Dieter not be wearing that goddamn German World War I belt buckle with the Iron Cross, _please_ \- I realised that the skinny kid with the goatee and the Jewish sounding name was _probably fucking Jewish_. Oh christ, no. The tension was unbearable. Do something, now, I thought to myself, even as the Velvets built to a crescendo.

"Doyle," I said, but there was no response. Doyle was staring at the black kid, but the black kid was just staring back placidly, stoned, happy, apparently oblivious to the tension in the room, even as the curiosity on Doyle's face intensified. "Doyle Saunders," I said a bit more loudly. "Do you think you should go and switch on the tube amps now, make sure they're warmed up... _now_?" The panic rose in my voice.

But at that, the mod kid suddenly snapped out of his happy contemplation of Doyle's face, and snapped his fingers and pointed. "Doyle Saunders! Of course. International School in Paris. Class of 89, right?"

A broad grin spread across Doyle's face as he stood up and extended his hand towards the other lad. "Gabe! Gabriel Ekangaki! God, you have fucking grown. Wish you were that tall when you were my point man!" The handshake turned into an extended hug, with backslapping.

But despite the sudden interruption of bonhomie, Dieter and Elisha were still glaring, and I felt the distinct need to get Dieter out of my flat, now. "Look, I don't mean to interrupt this... homecoming, high school reunion, or whatever, but the amps... someone needs to go and switch them on. If not you, Doyle, then Dieter?"

"Nah, we'll go," Doyle said. "Gabe, man, I will buy you a beer while we're down there, we have a lot to catch up on!"

"Take Dieter with you," I impressed upon him, but finally, the three of them went, and Elisha finally started to relax. I was torn for what to say. I felt the desperate need to apologise on Dieter's behalf, explain it was just an image, just a pose, that Dieter just liked to get up people's noses - Dieter was half fucking Jewish himself, for fucks sake - but there was no way to do it without letting Elisha know that I had, embarrassingly, drawn some kind of conclusion about Elisha's own ethnicity. Religion was one of those things that some people tended to just be weird about. So instead, I sat there, smiling, feeling very trapped, and wishing to god that Mary would just come out of that fucking bathroom right now, what was she doing, taking a goddamn shower in there?

"Interesting image, your band has," Elisha finally ventured.

I felt slightly piqued; after all I was talking to a man dressed in a wedding suit. "Well, yours, too, and I mean that in the best possible way..."

"The white clothes are for the projections. It was my partner, Mandy's idea. She's an artist, and she does these films..."

I heard no more, because at that moment, Mary stepped into the room. The halogen track-lighting caught her dress, which was short, and white, and clung to her body, shimmering with thousands of iridescent pearl-coloured beads, and caught her hair, looking almost white-blonde in the spotlight, and caught her white fishnet tights and those knee-high white go-go boots she always wore, and I could not actually think, let alone hear Elisha explaining their light show. She looked like an angel, standing there in the doorway, though no angel ever, ever grinned that naughtily.

"Do I look alright?" she asked, looking straight at me, until I felt the weight of that look down in my toes. "You look like you've seen a ghost, Danny."

"Hot damn! I... you look..." I stuttered for words, but I had none. Fortunately - or maybe unfortunately - Elisha swept into the gap.

"You look fine, Mary. Come on, let's go. I need to get out of here and get some air. I feel in definite need of the anti-defamation league after the air in here..."

"He's not actually a nazi, he's just obsessed with World War I. He gets these weird obsessions..." I found myself trying to explain as Mary wrapped herself back up in her long leather jacket and Elisha gathered her things.

"He's a total prick, though," Mary tossed back.

"He's a good bass player," I defended.

Mary and Elisha exchanged glances, and suddenly both of them started to laugh. "That's why you put up with me, isn't it?"

"At least you're only a Tory and not a nazi."

"I'm not a _Tory_... I can't help my ancestors _._ " And as the two of them walked down the hall together, talking quietly between themselves, they disappeared back into the little private world of their own band, and I felt a door shut, with me on the other side.

 

\----------

 

The Lacuna Lounge was packed already, even for a Friday night, and there was a bouncer on the door, clicking people in and out with a counter. The three of us received stamps on our wrists, Mary daintily turning her hand palm up for it, so the ink wouldn't show, then Mary and Elisha promptly disappeared. I scanned the room: there were Doyle and Gabe catching up over beers in a booth, there was Dieter showing off over the foosball table, and yes, there was Darin quietly working his way through our precious drink tickets. I immediately took charge and walked over, extending my hand.

"Hand them over!" Darin mumbled something into his beer, but produced 3 of them - who even knew how many he'd had to start with. I caught the eye of the bartender and shouted over the din "Cut him off, at least until after the show!"

Erland shrugged apologetically, then produced another pint of beer for me - on the house - to make up for it, but I didn't buy it. Darin played in another band with the guy, they were totally in on it together. In fact, I didn't entirely trust Erland not to have done it on purpose, sabotaging Darin's other band so that his band would get him full time again. Fucking drummers. I moved through into the back room, stopping occasionally only to shake hands or bump fists with other scene musicians I recognised, and all the while scanning the crowd. I had only ever seen one 15 year old photo of Barry Michaels, in an old issue of Billboard, but if I saw anyone of the right age or appropriate stature, I was going to make sure I introduced myself. But the audience were all young, and painfully hip, and none of them were old enough to be the man himself. Maybe he wasn't coming. And it would have all been for nothing. I felt the pressure of the deadline and that awful accounting job at my parents' firm breathing down my neck.

No, that was just Charlene's arm across the back of my shoulders, and a heavy word in my ear, telling us we were late already, and we were due onstage in ten minutes, no ifs, ands or buts, unless we wanted our set cut short. It was Mary's fault, I wanted to protest, but instead I nodded, said "Yes, ma'am" and went back to round up my band.

We looked cool. Of that I was fucking sure, even just watching Doyle setting up under the red glow of the stage lights. We looked fucking _right_ together, when Doyle and Dieter and I lined up all in a row, tailored trousers and black shirts and impeccable shoes. Well, Darin was never going to look right, and I had given up on trying to make him even try, but he was hidden away behind Gabe's weird-looking drumkit. What kind of a drumkit was just skins and no drum? It wasn't an electronic kit, was it? No, that was just the light. The drums were transparent fibreglass resin. I stared in horror. No, that really did _not_ look right, but fuck, it was too late now. I switched my amp from standby to on, walked up to the mic, muttering "chk-chk, chk-chk" and squinted into the lights, praying that Barry Michaels was out there, but praying even more that that amazing chick Mary was out there, watching me.

Suddenly Doyle was standing beside me, turning up. Where the hell was Dieter? Dieter was always the last person on the stage, and had been known to keep us waiting for five, ten minutes, as if wanting to prove that he was the most important person in the band. Wait, no, there he was, pushing his way through the crowd, carrying a vodka tonic. Doyle saw him arrive, and turned to me and whispered "Lights, camera, action," which was his signal that Dieter was now on set, and they could begin. It was always _Lights, Camera, Action_ when Dieter arrived, as if Dieter saw himself as the star of his own private movie. Well, Dieter's movie was about to have an awesome soundtrack.

I heard the click of Darin's sticks counting us in, and then I was lost.

I could never account, afterwards, for the time I spent onstage. It was a weird thing, how I spent my entire life looking forward to, preparing for that half hour, forty-five minutes I spent under the bright lights, but when it came down to it, the time was a blank. I knew I performed up there - I knew I played and sang and danced about like a madman. I'd seen grainy NYU film student footage of myself playing, and looking really fucking intense about it, so I knew that I did it, I knew that it _happened_. But it was like time out of time, an adrenaline-induced memory gap like a black-out drunk. Sometimes, flashes would come back to me a day or two later. Looking over and seeing Dieter's long skinny legs flailing about, those ridiculous 16-hole Doc Martens thumping against the floor, making the stage actually shake. Turning around to count off Darin, raising my own guitar in the air and bringing it down, repeatedly, to mark the time change, and I never even felt the blows, though sometimes I had bruises on my skinny hips the next day from the weight of the Epiphone. And in the centre of all that maelstrom that we created, stood Doyle, looking tired, jaded, maybe even bored, staring out at the audience with those impossibly sad, sad eyes, turning the hearts of every girl in that room to mush with his sad, sad lyrics, dashing up against the energetic roar of the music.

And just as suddenly, it was all over. I didn't even bother leaping off the stage into the admiring audience, as I could see Dieter doing from the corner of my eye. I knew I had a pedalboard to clear up, an amp to drag out of the way and hide somewhere that The Down Time wouldn't trip over it. Coiling cables, I stowed them away in the bottom of my guitar case before anyone could walk off with one. I rescued my own setlist, because someone had already stolen Doyle's - honestly, girls would steal the empty beer bottles that Doyle and Dieter had drunk out of after our shows sometimes. And then there was a hand on my shoulder, and I looked up into the impossibly blue-green eyes of Mary, standing over me and smiling down at me, whispering something I couldn't quite hear because my ears were still roaring as I'd forgotten to wear earplugs again. She handed me something - a drink, oh, a bottle of beer. Cheers. We clinked bottles. Then just as suddenly, she was gone, and I thrust my guitar into the gap between our amps and the stage, praying that the crowd was now actually too thick for anyone to walk away with it. And as I fought my way back through the crowd, accepting compliments, tripping over sofas, I looked up at the soundbooth, and there, standing next to the soundman, was the only person in the room over 30 years of age - a distinguished looking older gentleman with shoulder-length iron grey hair and an expression of intense concentration as he peered at the soundboard. Even from a 15 year old photo in Billboard, I just knew. That could only be Barry Michaels.

Steeling myself, I took a large swig of beer, then wiped off my sweaty palms on my suit trousers. Then I pushed my way over and introduced myself.

"So you're the persistent Mr Asheton," Barry laughed, his laid-back Californian accent showing a surprisingly light-hearted tone his serious face did not imply.

"Well, persistence is a virtue, is what I was always taught," I shrugged, beaming with pleasure just at the thought this man had heard even a part of our set. Christ, I hoped Darin hadn't been too off. "Thanks for coming to our show."

"Oh, no problem, I did it as a favour for an old friend. You have some powerful boosters."

"Excuse me?" I racked my brains for anyone we might know in common.

"Bebe Newcolm and I go way back. Probably further back than you've been alive, though she won't thank me for saying that." He laughed heartily, as my head spun. But Bebe thought my band was un-sellable! Didn't she? "Bebe has a good eye for talent. She says you've got a bright future at Windlass." My ego bobbed up inside my chest, feeling very inflated. "Though as a musician, or as an A&R man, she doesn't know, and that's for me to try to establish." My ego burst, crashing back on the shore of Bebe's lack of faith in my band.

But then again, my father had never said that the indicators of success in the music industry had to be my _own_ records. A career like Bebe's would surely be infinitely preferable to the accounting business, and still, I could stay close to the lifeblood of the industry. "So what have you established?" I laughed, trying to keep my tone as light as Barry's.

"That you've got fuckin' awful taste in drummers." It was said with a huge belly-laugh, but I still felt the criticism keenly.

"Yup," I agreed diplomatically. "He's alright when he's sober, but he gets super-nervous and tends to overcompensate for gig nerves with a few too many beers before our set. It's a problem we're aware of, we're working on."

Barry shook his head sadly. "One of the first indicators I look for, of whether a band is any good, is whether they can catch and keep a good drummer, especially in a cut-throat scene like New York." I cringed, scouring the room for any drummers, but all I could see was Fabrizio down on the floor, who would never leave his band, and Gabe up on the stage, grinning at Mary. Would Mary ever forgive me if I made a play for their drummer? Then again, was Gabe any good? I had no idea. I could see my future slipping away before my eyes.

"Do you think there's any hope for the rest of us?"

"Oh, yes." The certainty in his voice was reassuring. "There's definitely potential. Bebe's right - your bassist has _it_ , he has stage presence, most definitely. And I think your singer has star potential, too. A few voice lessons, and a decent haircut - and if he could learn to loosen up and maybe move and even speak more onstage - and he could be there, most definitely."

"But me and the drummer, we're toast," I sighed. I hadn't meant to speak it aloud; that was an uncharacteristic slip. Could I do it? Could I step aside for a more charismatic, better-looking guitarist, and become the manager or A&R genius behind Metropolis? There had to be a career in that, surely.

"Get rid of the drummer. But you... well, someone's writing those killer licks, and it's not Adolph on bass there."

I nearly choked on my beer as I tried to divert my laughter, and ended up spilling the last inch or so all over the floor. Shit, the soundman was going to kick me out of the booth for this, surely, but luckily his attention was diverted with trying to get The Down Time up and ready to go. "Thank you so much for the advice, Mr Michaels. Can I buy you a drink?"

"Please - it's Barry. Oh, that's very kind. Double whisky, single malt." He followed this with a snatch of gaelic I was sure would cost more than my weekly salary, but making a friend this powerful, it was worth the price. I thanked Barry and fought my way back through the crowd, which had somehow seemed to double in density even since the end of the set, to fetch the required drink.

The bar was quiet, almost deserted, which was unusual for a Friday night, and I was able to obtain another beer and a double whisky - ouch, pricey - almost immediately. But when I walked back into the other room, I wasn't initially sure that I had the right place. The dirty, crowded back room of the Lacuna Lounge had been transformed. Everything was white, and sparkling, and covered with snow. Mountains. I could almost smell the pine needles and the alpine air - wait, no, that was actually pine-scented incense they were burning to cover the Chinese Laundry and Kosher Deli stink of Ludlow Street - and hear the sound of breathing and the steady whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of footfalls in snow. Twinkling lights, twinkling sounds as the tree-covered vista opened up, and impossible jagged peaks came into view. The shuffling sound of brushes on a snare drum, and then the throb of slinky bassline. And I realised that The Down Time had already gone on. Without even waiting for an acknowledgement, I pushed the whisky up onto the soundboard in front of Barry, then fought my way through the crowd to stand as near to Mary as I dared.

It was magical, that was the only way I could ever really describe the experience of watching The Down Time for the first time. It was like watching a movie - no, actually, it _was_ watching a movie, because the films and the songs so perfectly intertwined and helped elucidate one another. Elisha was playing keyboards and singing, but there was a huge amount of background and texture that just seemed to be triggered off a sampler, while Gabe and Mary just spun this perfect rhythm section around it. Gabe was a good drummer - no, he was a fucking _amazing_ drummer, even with his silly, fibreglass drum kid. And he and Mary, they didn't play like they were lovers, they played like they were _one person_. Gabe's touch was so light - that, I knew was the real test of a good drummer. Any idiot could bash away at a kit without sense or sensitivity, but to play that deftly, that delicately, that took a fucking master. Not that they couldn't belt it out, when it was needed. As the mountain scene gave way to a vast array of radio telescopes at the top of the mountain, they moved seamlessly from that light, jazzy playing, to a kind of Can-like funk groove, Mary's fingers flying up and down the neck of her Fender VI as the sinuous basslines wove their way around Elisha's melodies. And as the telescopes gave way to rocket launches, and the rocket launches to an interstellar journey, they kicked up another gear again, to a kind of motorik thrash that had the whole audience banging their heads back and forth, though the place was too tightly packed to dance.

I forgot everything while that music was playing. I forgot Barry Michaels, I forgot Darin, the drummer that I had to sack, I forgot the rivalry between my childhood best friend and my glamourous nazi bass player, I even forgot how much I actually wanted to sleep with that incredibly beautiful girl who was standing up there in front of me, lulling me, mesmerising me with those hypnotic basslines.

I forgot myself completely. I sucked down my beer, and then I sucked down another that I found pressed into my hand once Doyle reappeared. Doyle was entranced, too, staring up at Mary with his sad eyes glinting. "They're fucking incredible," he told me once the set ended, then announced he was going to buy their CD.

Another beer, this one from Darin, who was too drunk to even hold it, and nearly spilled the whole thing over my expensive Italian shoes. Darin, who I would have to sack in the morning, but for now, it was enough to get Darin, and his snare drum and cymbal bag into a taxi and pack him off for home. And then, somehow, impossibly, I found myself sitting in a booth, curled up in a corner next to Mary, who kept looking at me sideways out of the corner of her eyes, out from under impossibly long white eyelashes that just had to be fake, and good god, that was what must have taken all that time in my bathroom, because either I was incredibly drunk and also now stoned, or else she had inch long white snowflake eyelashes, and tiny white diamonds stuck all over the top of her eyelids like ice crystals. She smelled like the incense they had been burning, pine needles and cotton and something else - maybe vanilla? She smelled like childhood and deep forests and _home_.

On the other side of the booth, there were Doyle and Gabe, both of them laughing and knocking back beers, Gabe growing more and more soft spoken to the point of inaudibility as he surreptitiously passed round a joint. Mary was starting to sound undeniably British at this point, the affected New York vowels completely gone.

Gabe laughed and said "She gets like that when she drinks, our Merry. You can always tell when she's been drinking, because she starts talking so English."

"Shut it, Gabriel," giggled Mary, with the cut-glass accent I remembered from infants school teachers in Hampstead.

"And what about you, Gabe?" teased Doyle, though he was struggling with his lengthening vowels himself. "What's her name again?"

"Merry," insisted Gabe with his clipped vowels. "Merry Merry, like the Monkees song."

"Merry Merry?" parroted Doyle. "What, like we wish you a merry merry christmas?"

"Indeed, Gabe, you're the most British of all of us," I said, though even I was having trouble keeping my t's from blurring into glottal stops. It was hard to resist, though, honestly, I had been 9 when I left London. I no longer had the slightest trace of an accent, except maybe when I drank.

"I'm not even British!" Gabe protested, indignant. "I just went to British boarding schools my whole life."

"Oh, you're such a diplomat's son," Mary teased.

"Shut it, Merry," giggled Gabe.

"Merry, Merry, quite contrerry, how does your gaaaaarden grow," sung Doyle in a Mary Poppins accent.

"Oh, he is, though. Don't let the clothes fool you. He's a diplomat's son. Father owns half of Cameroon," Merry persisted.

"Really?" I asked, my eyes huge. With Doyle's friends, there was no telling. Some of them really were Italian counts and the sons of minor Saudi royalty. The son of a diplomat from Cameroon would not surprise me in the slightest. Though a jazzy drum playing son of a diplomat from Cameroon, that was an oddity, even for New York.

"No, not really," said Gabe quietly, and after staring at me for a second, both he and Merry burst into gales of laughter. For a moment, I felt stung, like my new friends were making fun of me, but then I realised that Merry had slumped backwards as she laughed, her body pressed loosely against me. If I moved my arm, which was currently slung casually across the back of the sofa, I could be embracing her.

"Alright, you've had your fun," I warned, and shifted my weight. My arm brushed lightly against her shoulder, and she moved effortlessly into the crook of my arm, settling into me like she wanted to be there. My whole body felt like it was suddenly alight, and I was starting to get an erection.

But after that heartbeat's pause, Gabe grinned wickedly, his lips splitting open in a hopeless smile, as he corrected. "Alright. Well, maybe a quarter." The whole table collapsed into laughter as I realised I'd been had, a second time. But even as they laughed, I felt Merry patting me gently and reassuringly on the thigh under the table, and looked up at her, startled to realise, _this might actually happen_.

And in an instant, it was all over. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone waking out of the back room through into the bar, and then I heard an all too familiar voice sing out "Mary, Mary, where you going to? Mary, Mary, can I go too?"

"Blandford!" Merry leapt up out of her seat, and in an instant, she was upon the newcomer, throwing her arms around his neck and embracing him. No, it wasn't fair. I wasn't even sure until I saw that blandly handsome face under that stupid floppy hair and framed with those dumb sideburns (making me suddenly feel very self conscious about my own floppy hair and long sideburns). And even when I saw that face, I still didn't quite believe it. Blandford Lannings. He had been in the year above me at prep school, and just excelled at everything. He was more popular than me, he was better at soccer than me, he was smoother with girls than me, to the point where every girl I had ever had a crush on had ended up going out with Blandford.

In fact, he was just plain better at everything than me, except maybe English Literature and Mathematics, but what girl ever gave a fuck about being good at schoolwork? And as if that hadn't been bad enough, now Blandford Lannings' shitty, derivative garage-rock band was playing all round the East Village, pinching gigs and support slots off Metropolis, and what's more, now he was standing with his arms around the girl I wanted, his hands just casually resting on the small of her back, inches above the gentle swell of her beautiful butt. And I had never wanted to punch anyone quite so badly in his entire life. Me, the non-violent, pacifist, non-smoking vegetarian who couldn't even drown spiders in the bath, I hated the idea of violence so much.

My face must have been transparent to the whole table, because Gabe leaned forward, passed me the joint one more time and tapped me gently and reassuringly on the hand. "Sorry, mate. Tough luck, yeah?" he said, then burst into giggles.

As Blandford bought her a drink, and chatted her up at the bar, I silently fumed. Then I gave up and started to move the band's equipment across the road and up the four flights of stairs to my apartment, piling up guitars and amps in the hall as I burned off my lust and my disappointment. When I got back to the bar, I found that the van was parked up on the sidewalk again, but Doyle and Gabe were gone, though the scooter had been wheeled inside, as clearly Gabe was in no fit condition to drive. Elisha reappeared, and the change in his mood was remarkable. Where before the gig he had been brittle and nervous, he was now expansive and friendly, thanking me profusely for the help as they loaded the van. As we stood at the door, waiting for Merry and Blandford to finish their drinks, I made small talk with Elisha, the usual patter of yeah, that was awesome, we should totally play a gig together soon. I was getting antsy, desperate to leave, go home, smoke a bowl and go to bed, but something desperate clung on to the hope that I could physically prevent Merry from leaving with the odious Blandford.

But Elisha saw where my eyes were directed, and smiled benignly. "She'll be done soon," he assured me brightly.

I lowered my voice. "Aren't they dating?"

"Mary and Blandford? No way."

"Are you sure?" I thought my desire must be shining all over my face from the way Elisha looked at me, half fond, half pitying.

"I sincerely doubt it. They've been in a band together. Mary never mixes business with pleasure."

"Mary was in The Motivators?" I stepped back with surprise. Suddenly it clicked into place. The costumes. Rehearsals on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to fit around Blandford's basketball schedule. If I had had any idea that such talent and beauty lurked in Blandford's backing band, I might, just once, have gone and checked them out.

"Still is. Though they don't really play that often any more, since I stole her away from them." Elisha's wink was unmistakable. "It _can_ be done..."

When I looked back up at the bar, the unthinkable had happened. Merry was standing alone, though I could see Blandford's retreating back heading for the can. Before I could talk myself out of it, I propelled myself over. "Hey."

"Hey." She brightened when she saw me, and smiled. In the harsh light now that the bar's main lights had come back on, I could see that she had dimples when she smiled, dimples highlighted by the brush of glitter across her cheeks.

And then my courage failed me. "So, erm. Oh. Yeah." I put my hands into the pockets of my parka, and suddenly felt a batch of flyers for the next Metropolis show, that I had meant to hand out to the kids as they left. "It was super-good playing with you. I, erm... well, here's a flyer for our next show. Hope to see you there." And with this, I thrust the thing into her hands, and scarpered before I threw up all over her white go-go boots with my impossible nerves.

She stared at the flyer, then she stared back at me. "What?!" She chased after me, and caught up with me just outside the door. It was so cold I could see her breath, and though I was shivering in my parka, she was just standing there in her gauzy white dress, blocking my way. "What is this? Don't give me your fucking flyer for your fucking band." She thrust it abruptly back into my hands.

"But..." I started to protest, and was I really fucking stoned, or was she actually really _angry_? "I meant it; it'd be nice to see you again."

"So ask for my fucking phone number!" she exploded.

"What?" I hadn't actually thought that far.

"Don't play this game where you give me a flyer and say come to my gig, and I turn up like a muppet, and you never come to mine. If you want to see me again, ask to exchange phone numbers like a normal fucking human being," she insisted.

"I... OK," I stuttered, though I didn't trust my mouth to speak. I must have been grinning like a complete fool, just staring at her with blind lust and bewildered adoration, because she snatched the flyer back from my hands.

But instead of folding it and putting it away, she ripped it in half, and for a moment, I was about to protest, but then she produced a stub of eyeliner from the depths of her pocketbook. "I write my number on this piece, then you write your number on that piece, and we swap. Do you not know how this works?"

Blindly, foolishly, I dug in my pockets, found a pencil, though its lead was almost completely broken off, and did my best to write my phone number on my half of the flyer. Thankfully, her number was printed out larger, in big, looping letters, and slightly more legible than my own handwriting. "Is that a zero or a six on the end?"

She squinted at the paper. "It's a six. Call me. Fuck, I'm freezing. Elisha, can we go? You are gonna give me a ride to the Seven train right?"

"I'll give you a ride all the way to Queens, if you like," Elisha told her, handing her her leather jacket.

"So it's 718?" I called after her as she clambered into the passenger seat of the van. She hadn't bothered supplying an area code.

"Of course it's seven one fucking eight," she shouted back at me through the open window, as the van drove off. "Do I look like a diplomat's son?"

I stood on the pavement of Ludlow Street and stared at the piece of paper in my hand, until the lights snapped off in the Lacuna Lounge.


	4. I Know A Room Full Of Musical Tunes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the wreckage of the Lacuna Lounge gig, Metropolis decide that really, they have to find another drummer.
> 
> But first, Daniel has to survive a much more nerve-wracking ordeal... a date with the grooviest girl in the world. Can he keep his cool long enough for them to drop their guards and actually get to know one another?

It was a tradition, the post-gig pick-over our performance, usually conducted with terrible hangovers the next afternoon in my apartment. Although it was Dieter who had started recording every show, back in his Warholian "tape every conversation" phase, Doyle had come to be really keen on the playback, critiquing every song, and scribbling down ad-libbed ideas that had worked well in performance, for future use. Myself, ever the perfectionist, I winced at the occasional mistakes on guitar, and fretted over how bad the drums sounded. As Doyle and I crouched by the stereo speakers, ears pressed close to speaker cones to absorb every note, Dieter relaxed on the sofa, his nose buried in a book of the essays of Water Benjamin.

"This is worse than I thought," I sighed, after a particularly grating passage where my guitar had kept perfect staccato time, but Darin's kick drum wandered erratically around it.

Usually Doyle contradicted me, told me it was fine, that I was being overly perfectionist, but this time he just shook his head balefully. "This is no good. No good at all."

"Barry's right. He's got to go."

"Barry, is it. Are we on a first name basis with all the hip producers now," Dieter teased drolly from the sofa.

"But what are we going to do about it?" Doyle pointed out, sitting back on his heels and pushing his hair out of his face, casting about for his cigarettes.

"Please open the window if you're going to smoke in here," I said, more out of habit than annoyance.

"Come on, your damage deposit has gotta be long gone," said Doyle, nodding at the tea stains on my carpet.

"My asthma, OK?" I snapped. Doyle rolled his eyes and opened the window.

"Oh, don't. It's fucking freezing. You're so selfish, Daniel." Dieter made a massive performance of pulling his military great coat around his shoulders before sinking back into _The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction_.

"We could ask Tony Branosi to fill in for now, but you know he charges a minimum of $50 a gig, and extra for the cab if he has to bring his kit." We had been over this a thousand times, I could already list all the options. "Or we could sink another twenty bucks taking out another round of ads in the Village Voice, and sifting through every loser in the Tri-State area."

"Just ask Gabe from last night. If he'd such good mates with Doyle, surely he'll help an old school chum out." It was the most sensible suggestion that had ever come from Dieter's mouth, and if anyone but him had come up with it, we'd probably have debated it properly, but something in me just recoiled. It was true; Gabe was an awesome drummer, the kind of drummer who could really make our songs come alive, and sing and sizzle and crackle with electricity. But I was stuck on that weird loyalty to Mary. Well, not so much loyalty, as the fact that I did not want to do a single thing to jeopardise staying on Mary's good side and yes, maybe getting in her panties.

"He's a really good drummer, yes," I heard myself agree. "But he's totally wrong for this band. It would never work. Dieter needs someone that he can bounce off, and for that we need someone who's just straight ahead, right down the middle, four on the floor, total precision, like a metronome. Gabe is great, but he's too... jazzy, too... syncopated, too..."

"Just say it, he's too _black_ is what you mean," Doyle snorted, then exhaled his cigarette smoke straight back into the house, towards me, as if he were aggressively trying to provoke an asthma attack. Across the room, Dieter didn't even bother to suppress a giggle.

"No, that is not what I mean," I protested, pulling back as if I had been slapped. "Are you calling me a racist? Do you have any idea how hurtful and insulting that is, to call me a racist?"

"I'd say it's more hurtful to be the recipient of racism, but that's a mere quibble over semantics, isn't it," muttered Dieter under his breath.

"Not to mention that I resent you implying that _I'm_ the biggest racist in this room when there's a guy in a fucking nazi uniform draped across my sofa." Clearly, he hadn't been home since the gig, since he was still in his stage clothes, but I wouldn't indulge his ego by asking where he'd been.

"Not Nazi; World War I," Dieter drawled without even lifting his eyes from the page. Doyle said nothing, he just took another drag of his cigarette and looked smug. 

I struggled to try to reclaim my reputation, still smarting from the smear. "Gabe has a great look, he has great style, and on a visual level, he'd be a credit to this band - he dresses a lot sharper than you two do, to be sure - but not only is he the wrong drummer for this band, but more to the point, it would be impolitic to steal another band's drummer, especially a band we're so friendly with, and... and..."

"And stealing the drummer from Mary Mary's band might put a crimp in your plans to bone Mary Mary," Dieter finally announced, slamming the book shut. Doyle creased up with laughter, as my face flushed with indignation.

"Alright, yes. Stealing the drummer from Mary's band would seriously impede my chances of jumping Mary's bones. But considering you two treat gratifying your boners like it's an international sport, no, I do not think this is an unreasonable objection."

Once Doyle managed to stop guffawing, he leaned forward and patted me reassuringly on the knee. "Nah, you're fine, old man. We all want you to get laid. We'll start running the ad in the Village Voice next week. But who's going to call Darin?"

Both Doyle and Dieter looked pointedly at me, and I knew that yet again, the uncomfortable or difficult bits of the band would always fall to me. "I'll ring Darin. But maybe not until after we've already found a workable alternative?"

I spent my whole life on the fucking phone. Calling to organise rehearsals, calling round studios to find out who had what time free, then calling each one of my bandmates in turn to try and carefully co-ordinate their social lives, then calling the studio back and hoping that the Motivators or whoever hadn't grabbed the decent rehearsal room with the working vocal monitors in the meantime. Calling venues to beg for gigs, again and again and again, learning the bizarre rules of who to phone when, because Charlene from the Lacuna only took bookings after 2pm on Tuesday but Amy at the Mercury Lounge did her scheduling on Sunday evenings. Calling record companies to check if they had got the new Metropolis demo, and yeah, would they like a guest spot on the next show, because actually we were supporting the Charms at their sold-out Brownie's show, yeah, that was a real score, and the guest list might be tight but I could maybe squeeze them in if they wanted to check us out, live? So once again, calling our useless drummer to tell him that he was sacked, that would fall to me. Of course it did.

"It'll be fine," Doyle told me, pulling out his rolling papers and starting to roll a joint. "You always stress so hard over everything, Dan, and then it's always fine."

I glared at him resentfully, trying to think of a way to tactfully say that the reason everything always _did_ work out fine was because I'd worked so hard to make it turn out that way, but abruptly he started to pass the joint to Dieter, completely bypassing me. "Hey!" I protested.

"And what about your asthma?" teased Doyle, as he faked me out, then passed it in my direction. I grabbed it before he could change his mind.

"Fuck off," I muttered and inhaled deeply, willing the stress to go away. It never really worked, but I always tried. Pot had a way of making me more paranoid and stressed out instead of less, but I took another hit just to make sure, then passed it over to Dieter.

Once Doyle and Dieter had taken off for whatever debauchery they had planned for their evenings, I stretched out on my own sofa, hands behind my head, and stared up at the ceiling. Sometimes when I was off my face on good ganja, the lines in the ceiling formed themselves into a ballerina, pirouetting across the apartment, one leg raised behind her, and both arms extended above her head. I'd come to think of her as my good luck charm. Mary had long, lithe limbs like a dancer; I liked that about her, though she was probably too tall to have ever been a ballerina. Mary. I should call Mary. But, no. It was Saturday night, a chick like that would never be at home. Hell, I shouldn't be at home, really, but I was completely exhausted from packing in a 45-hour week at Windlass, and then playing a gig on top of it. Besides, I could stand to learn a few things from Dieter and Doyle. Doyle said you should never call a chick within three days of getting her number. Make her wait; that would make her more keen. So I retrieved the scrap of flyer with her number scrawled across it from my parka pocket, wrote the number carefully in my address book, and resolved to call her... on Tuesday. Yeah, that was a good delay. Playing it cool.

 

\----------

 

I called her on Sunday morning, of course I did, trying not to sweat and misdial as I pounded her number into my phone. What if she'd given me the wrong number? What if I never saw her again? No, I could just go to another Down Time gig - or god forbid a Motivators gig - and ask her if that 6 really was mean to be a 0. I'd been prepared to listen for four dials, then hang up before her answering machine came on. I'd been prepared to renege on my conviction anyway, and leave my name and number, desperately, like the fool I was. I had not been prepared for a busy signal. For a few moments, I listened to it blaring away in my ear, shocked. My own call waiting clicked in the receiver, but I ignored it and let it go to the answering service. I hung up and dialled again, but the line was still engaged. Putting down the phone, I glared at it, visions of Blandford Lannings dancing in my head. And then, suddenly, the short, sharp chirp of the answering service letting me know I had a message. Fuck, it was probably Doyle wanting to change the wording of the Voice ad, so I picked up and listened. But no. All the hairs down the back of my neck prickled as I heard that now-familiar accent.

"Hiya. It's me. Mary. _Merry_. Oh. I guess you're not in. Well, I'm about to go out myself in about 10, 20 minutes, so, erm, if you get this in time, ring me back, if not, I'll probably be in again this evening. Be seeing you!"

Desperately, I clicked off, and hit redial, praying to catch her before she left. Mercifully, this time it rang, and her voice answered. "Hello?"

"Hi. It's me. Daniel." My voice came out all in a high-pitched squeak, as I found myself spilling out a dumb explanation I should never have attempted. "This is so weird, but I was just ringing you, and wondered why I kept getting a busy signal. What kind of synchronicity is it, that you decided to ring me at the exact moment I rang you? I'm so glad you left a message."

But instead of snorting with derision at this ridiculous speech, her voice tinkled with laughter. "There, it's fate. What are you doing right now?"

"Right now? Ringing you," I blurted out.

"Come out and meet me, instead. I hate talking on the phone, I'd rather see you in person. Meet me at the museum in half an hour?"

"Museum? Which museum?" I scrabbled for my wallet, my keys. It was lucky that I'd already showered and dressed and dried my hair, though all these things had been done as delaying tactics so I didn't end up ringing her at 10am on a Sunday morning.

"The Met, duh." Her voice indicated that she clearly thought there was no other museum in the whole city, and I had a sudden glimpse of hope that I could show her MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and work my way into her good graces, impress her with my knowledge of the cultural centres of New York. Granted, I hadn't actually been in a museum in about a year, and the last time I had been to the Guggenheim, I had gone with Dieter, who had irritated the shit out of me by standing close up in front of the paintings, eyeing one after another with an intense curiosity, as if trying to absorb the creative essence out of each. I hoped she wasn't a starer. "I'll wait for you outside the coat-check on the right, just as you come in," she chirped.

"Sounds good to me. I'll see you in half an hour... well, maybe 40 minutes, depending on what the 6 is doing."

"Be seeing you!" she burbled, and hung up without saying goodbye.

Grabbing half a stale bagel that Dieter might have left on my counter the afternoon before, I stuffed it in my mouth, checked my hair in the mirror one last time, then pulled on my parka and raced down the stairs. It was starting to snow outside, but not even a blizzard could keep me from this appointment.

I was late, dancing up the steps of the museum at 11:40, but she wasn't waiting for me. Praying that she was just delayed by the 7, and hadn't actually gone in without me, I left my parka in the coat-check and sat down to wait for her on the bench opposite. At a quarter to, she arrived in a flurry of blonde hair, trailing dislodged snow.

"Come on, we'll be late," she insisted, not even pausing to greet me properly, just dashing off and leaving me to chase and catch up. She stopped at the ticket desk just long enough to toss them a dollar in exchange for an admission badge, and I tutted. "What?" she shrugged, as I paid the full suggested ten dollar entry fee. "Come on, I come here every week. I easily pay the full fee in less than three months. Now hurry, or we're going to miss it."

She dashed off again, heading through the Egyptian section, leaving me to negotiate through the crowds of tourists as she bobbed up ahead of me. Fortunately, she was wearing a rather distinctive pale blue suede coat, with massive ruffs of silvery-grey fur round the collar and wrists, so I could keep track of her bobbing blonde head even through the crush. She turned down one corridor, then dodged through another exhibit, cut through a row of glass doors, then suddenly we were in the Temple of Dendur. I was impressed, I had been coming to the museum since I was 10, but I still got lost in the exhibits. The Temple of Dendur, with its complement of flashing photographers bulbs, was apparently not her objective, though, so she pushed on, through another set of doors, through the hall of armour, along a wide corridor lined with Renaissance sculptures, and then we were in the New American Wing.

"Up here..." she directed, climbing a winding metal staircase that looked awfully like something that was part of the exhibit, and really should not be climbed, then we emerged out onto a balcony. I leaned over to look out across a wide indoor fountain, lined with lush palms, but Merry was dashing off again. "Down this way, oh, good, we're not too late." She pushed through another door and we were surrounded by intricate metalwork, golden sundials and silver astrolabes. And then she led me through into a smaller room, lined with cabinets that seemed to be full of clockwork. "I love this part!" she exclaimed, turning around to grin at me with manic glee, and suddenly the room exploded with sound.

Clasping my hands over my ears, I tried to work out what was going on, looking around wildly for the source of the cacophony. Slowly, disoriented by the noise, I realised the room was filled with grandfather clocks, early pocket watches, a medieval water clock, beautiful carriage clocks and table clocks and mantelpiece clocks, all of them chiming out noon at once. All I could think was the end of that Pink Floyd song, Bike, with its chiming room full of musical tunes, some rhyme, some ching, most of them are clockwork.

Merry clapped her hands with undisguised pleasure, and skipped about the room, peering into cabinets and watching clockwork mechanisms and pendulums as the last of the late-comers started chiming out the hour. It was overwhelming. It was just entirely too much, the sound, the noise: ping! bong! boom! chirp! chime! And the endless whir of clockwork and the whine of ticking machinery, the colour and motion, whirling gears and swinging pendulums, the flash of light off brass. And darting in between all of it, this beautiful girl was practically dancing, her face shining with joy, sending blonde hair and blue fake fur flying in every direction.

After about five minutes, as the last of the stragglers, a huge medieval church clock so ancient it might be excused running a bit late, let out its last _bong_! and fell silent, Merry turned back towards me, raised her eyebrows meaningfully and asked, breathless "Bong! Isn't that wonderfull? Have you ever heard such a thing?"

" _Bong_ ," I agreed, unsteady on my feet, feeling completely disoriented and slightly dazed, my ears ringing from the noise. "I think I'm deaf now, but wow. That was... wow, how did you know about this?"

"Well, they do it every day, how wouldn't I know?" She shrugged as if it were obvious, and bent down to examine the tiny clockwork parts of a minute pocket watch.

"Hot damn," I agreed, though perhaps not enthusiastically enough, as she turned and fixed me with a slightly sceptical expression.

"You think I'm a muppet for getting so excited about it, don't you."

"No!" I protested, suddenly panicking. "Not at all! I think it's really... cool."

" _Cool_." Her eyes narrowed as she echoed me, and her face looked so disappointed that I started to feel like a _muppet_ for letting her down. "So they got you, too, huh?"

"Who? Who got me?"

"The Cool Police," Merry said with a little dismissive shrug, like I didn't know a single gesture could carry so much contempt. "You know, I am so sick of that whole Lower East Side fucking bullshit, dividing the world up into 'cool' and 'uncool'. Like, the way every single goddamn person is constantly checking over their shoulder to see if anyone else thinks something is cool or not before deciding to invest in even admitting to liking it. Can't a person just love what they really love, and fuck whether it's cool or not... fuck that whole jaded, detached, pretend you're above it all, _I'm too cool for this_ bollocks. I mean, really... fuck cool. Do you _like_ it?"

"I..." My head spun. "OK, maybe cool was the wrong word."

"Oh, fucksake," she swore, and turned on her heel, staring down into a cabinet full of clockwork, her fingers tapping angrily on the glass. "You know, I thought, maybe, just maybe, that you weren't like that. Whenever I used to see you walking down Ludlow St, you always had this gleam in your eye, like shit _mattered_ to you, that you were incapable of pretending that you were just another hipster, always maintaining some ironic distance from ever committing to an actual experienced emotion. I watched you, so carefully, when you played guitar, trying to work out if you were infected with this dumb _cool_ bug or not. You played guitar like you _loved_ it. Like you were excited just to be there, and you didn't give a damn what anyone else thought. Maybe I got you wrong... never mind, it was a stupid idea, bringing you here." 

"Merry." Suddenly I saw the whole thing, the room full of clocks, her excitement, as a kind of test, and a kind of test I was afraid I was failing. Badly. She turned back towards me, biting her lip, as if willing me to say something not-stupid, and I just about managed to stutter "Cool was a dumb word. I'm sorry. It wasn't a stupid idea. I think it's enchanting, and magical, and... I'm just dumbstruck, actually. Overwhelmed. Completely overwhelmed by such an unexpected experience. But mostly... I _love_ that you're so super-stoked by this. It's adorable and really and I..." 

I stopped before I blurted out something really stupid, like that I was in love with her, because that was all too close to the top of my mind as I looked at her, that perfect nose, slightly turned up at the end; wide, full lips, just a little too willing to pucker into a smile; the dimples in her cheeks; those huge blue-green eyes almost exactly the same turquoise of a beach I'd once swum in near Nice. She was the most incredible woman I'd ever met, and my ears were still ringing and my head was still echoing with chimes and now she was just staring at me, her eyes flashing and defiant, like she thought I was a total idiot.

"It's just... OK, for real, it's just that I left the house so quickly, before I'd had time for my first cup of tea. I can't even skip down Ludlow St without a cuppa from the Pink Pony. Honestly, you're right, I'm not jaded and I'm not some _hipster_ , I swear, and it's wonderful that you thought those things, about me. But it'd be hard for me to even get excited about an alien invasion of earth before my first cup of tea."

She burst out laughing, her hand over her mouth. "Oh my god, I'm so sorry. You must be dying."

"Shall we go and get brunch? My treat," I offered, trying to salvage something of the situation.

"Come on." Taking me by the arm, she dashed off again, pulling me through the bowels of the museum, hurrying me along with the gentle pressure of her hand on the inside of my elbow. With her touch so warm against me, I didn't protest, feeling her body so close to mine as she swept me off on another magic carpet ride. Down another corridor, along a balcony ringed with dozens of old fashioned instruments, lutes and tambours and harps, back across the top of the hall full of armour, and then we emerged, past the head of a grand marble staircase, at the balcony that ringed the cathedral-like hall of the main entrance. There, hidden away beneath the skylights, was a raft of tables strung out alongside cabinets full of Islamic tiles and Ming vases, a small tea-room, and a grand piano with a woman in evening dress tinkling out soft Satie serenades perfect for a Sunday morning hangover. It was the kind of hidden New York gem I liked to think that I could have shown her, but instead, here she was guiding me to a table in a secret sanctuary I had no idea even existed. I sat, relieved that the mad dash was over, yet slightly disappointed to be released from the electric urgency of her touch.

Leaning towards her, I wondered if it would be too much to reach to take her hand, but a waitress came and collected our order - cappuccino, Earl Grey tea, and two cherry Danishes - then left us staring at each other across the table. I hadn't seen her in sunlight before, but she looked younger in daylight, without all that caked-on stage makeup, her nose and cheeks dusted softly with freckles. She wasn't in costume today; with her furry blue coat thrown over the back of her chair, she revealed herself dressed casually in flared jeans, faded and patched several times, and a blue floral shirt that caught the colour her eyes, a paisley scarf draped round her neck against the cold. Dieter would have had a fit if he saw me out on a date with a girl wearing actual patched jeans - Dieter had a real _thing_ against jeans. Oh, fuck Dieter. Why on earth was I thinking about Dieter at a time like this? Why couldn't I just have Dieter's magic touch and know what to _say_ to her that would make her fall into my arms and tremble like a flower?

"What?" she blurted out, sounding suddenly worried. I looked up, startled, and shrugged. "You just looked suddenly very angry. I wondered if I'd said something wrong."

"No, sorry. I was miles away. You're fine. Super-fine." I tried to grin at her. The waitress brought a whole pot of tea and I fussed with it as I waited for it to steep. 

"Cheers," she told the waitress with a winsome smile, emptied two packets of brown sugar into her cappuccino then lifted it to her mouth to suck the foam. When she put the cup down, there was a tiny dab of cream on the tip of her nose, and I wanted nothing more than to lean over and lick it off her. "Hang on," I told her. "You've got..."

"What?" That startled look again. This was not going how I'd hoped.

"Just a moment." Picking up my napkin, I moistened it slightly with the tip of my tongue, then reached out and wiped the foam from her face. "Sorry, you had coffee on your nose."

"Great, and now I've got your saliva all over my nose," she said. I looked back at her, completely guilty, because I had, at that moment, started imagining getting my saliva all over her nose, her face, her lips, and especially in her mouth and on her tongue. It was impossible not to look at that mouth and not fantasise about kissing it. But then she started to laugh, a nervous, high-pitched laugh that sounded nothing like her usual low, throaty voice. Dieter would have just made the comment about exchanging saliva, and then Dieter would now be snogging her. As I stared at her lips, they opened again and spoke. "Sorry. God, I am so fucking nervous I'm completely fucking this up, aren't I? Are you nervous at all, just sitting there as cool as a cucumber in your cute little mod suit?"

And suddenly I just started to laugh. I saw it, at that moment, the tension on her face, the slight shake in her hands, the way her limbs seemed tight, curled underneath her instead of sprawled under the table like they had at the Lacuna Lounge. The nervous energy, the manic dashes, the constant turning around to me for approval and accusing me of thinking she was a _muppet_. She was just as scared as I was. "I'm terrified," I confessed, finally pouring my tea out into my cup to see how strong it had steeped. "Despite what you might think, I am not a particularly audacious person, especially when it comes to women. I am very nervous, in fact, this is worse than pre-gig nerves."

"Oh god, that bad." Her eyes flashed in understanding. "But yeah. Terrified is about right. I keep putting my foot in it, with you, don't I?"

"Not as bad as I feel like I'm fucking up." I grinned apologetically at the accidental swear, but when I risked a glance, I saw it had just made her smile. "But really, I can't imagine you being frightened of anything." I shook my head slowly, then risked a bite of my Danish, hoping I wouldn't end up wearing it.

"Really?" she stared at me in disbelief. "I feel like a complete fucking elephant, just charging in where angels fear to tread, blown up on bravado and dutch courage, usually, but that's just bluster. That's not about not being scared." There was a pause as we both sipped our drinks. "I shouldn't have rung you, should I? It intimidates men."

"I rung you," I reminded her.

"I just blurted out and asked you on a date. I didn't really think you'd agree."

"Yeah, OK, I am slightly intimidated," I admitted, suddenly feeling the fear draining out of me, though whether that was the caffeine or the conversation, I couldn't quite tell. But something about the way she confessed to her own nerves made me feel more at ease with her. Like she wasn't a terrifyingly beautiful angel-queen, she was just an ordinary, human girl, scared to be on a date with a boy.

"I knew it..." She rolled her eyes, and played with a bit of hair, twisting it round and round her finger. "I just seem to scare the shit out of men, and I don't even know why."

"Well, I am intimidated by your musical skill. I'm intimidated by how good your band is. I'm intimidated by your amazing clothes and your beautiful go-go boots..." I glanced down under the table, but she was wearing plain black Chelsea boots under her jeans, round-toed, flat-heeled, understated but elegant. I was wearing Chelsea boots myself, but mine were square-toed, Cuban-heeled, really a bit too ostentatious for the occasion, but I was trying to make an impression and I felt like I needed the inch and a half of extra height they gave me. "But I am not intimidated by you asking me on a date. In fact, I am super relieved." Super relieved? What was this, high school?

But instead of laughing at me, a broad grin spread across her face. "Super relieved. And I am super glad you came."

"Me, too." We grinned at one another foolishly, and I suddenly felt like I actually stood a chance with this woman.

"Shall we go and, um..." She giggled nervously and looked out across the huge, cavernous room, then her eyes flickered back to my face, and she smiled like she actually seemed to enjoy looking at me. "Shall we go and look at the museum?"

To be honest, I'd have been perfectly happy to just sit there all day and stare at her, and feel her interested gaze upon me in return, but I nodded decisively. "What do you want to see first? We are right by the Islamic wing here..."

"Oh my god, the carpets..." Mary's eyes lit up. "And don't take this the wrong way, but the harem room. I have dreams about that harem room."

"I love that room," I agreed, then quickly back-pedalled. "...not that I have a harem, mind you." 

For a second I almost blew it by suggesting that Dieter could probably use it, but Mary beat me to it, giggling "Don't even think of mentioning your creepy bassist."

I made a gesture of zipping my mouth shut as she laughed. "The Frank Lloyd Wright room, I really want to see that while we're here, and I love that they have rooms from a Japanese house upstairs, so you can see what he was inspired by."

"The Noguchi rock - that water table, it's incredible."

"So pure and super-minimalist. Have you seen his sculpture park out in Long Island City? No? I'd love to take you there."

"I should have figured you for a minimalist. So no chance of dragging you downstairs to look at all the insane rococo bedrooms. You know, the Venetian one, with all the frou-frou, and the angels carved into the ceiling, smiling down on you as you sleep."

"I know the one you mean, but it creeps me out. Can you imagine sleeping in that bed, with all those eyes looking down on you? Can you imagine trying to have sex in that bed?" I hadn't meant to say that bit aloud; it had just slipped out. But she laughed naughtily and covered her mouth with her hand.

"Depends on who's on top, doesn't it, who gets the best view?" Her eyes flashed, and for a moment, I had a sudden image of sinking back into the elaborate cushions, with Merry labouring on top of me, sweaty and naked, her long blonde hair hanging down in my face as I thrust up into her. It must have been shining all over my face, from the way she giggled slightly and leaned forward, lowering her voice. "I used to fantasise, when I first started coming here, about getting locked in overnight, and going and sleeping in that bed. Do you want to try and get locked in tonight?"

My cheeks burned bright pink, and I raised my teacup to my mouth to cover the blush, even as I could feel it spread down my neck and across my chest.

"You are so adorable when you blush! I think I only say such terrible provocative things to get you to go all red like that."

Although I had never thought of myself as adorable in my life, I blossomed under the attention, squirming in my seat, even as I beamed back at her. "Look, I know you think I'm just an uptight square that just needs to be bust out of his strait-laced primness, but really, I am in a band, I hang around on the Lower East Side, I am used to a certain amount of banter; I just choose not to be a _jerk_ about it..."

She burst out laughing again. I liked making her laugh like that. "I wouldn't change you for the world. I always like the uptight, nerdy, shy ones. Come on, my favourite member of Slur is Graham Cooper."

"Graham Cooper is one of my favourite guitar players," I told her sheepishly, swishing the last of my tea around my cup before drinking it, then polishing off my danish. I dug twelve dollars out of my wallet, and left it on the table, then stood up, extending my hand to her. "Come on, you want nerdy? Let me take you back down to the armour hall, and explain to you every decisive battle of the Hundred Years War. I warn you, I was a super-massive history nerd in school."

She took my hand. Yes, she actually took my hand, and held it, squeezing my fingers gently as she studied me from the corner of her eye. And as we walked together back down the wide marble sweep of the main stairs, I felt about ten feet tall, like yes, everybody look at me, I am the luckiest man on the Upper East Side, on a date with this amazing woman.

"Was that your favourite subject in school?" she asked, sounding actually quite interested. I couldn't believe she cared. "History?"

"God yeah, I loved it. I was obsessed."

"Dates and historical figures; I suppose that goes along with your whole obsession with the pop charts," she teased.

"No, not just dates and historical figures, but the whole... The sweep of human history, and how it goes in waves. How differently people lived in other ages, how differently they thought, and why they believed what they believed. I think that's what got me interested in philosophy - the reasons and justifications people came up with for the way they behaved, manners and customs which were basically based on philosophical and political fashions, whether that was Feudalism or the Enlightenment. A lot of people look at history and say, well, this event or that event caused a massive paradigm change. But I always wondered, did the event really cause the change, or did the paradigm change bring the event into being. You have to wonder which came first, the behaviour or the philosophy." Maybe I was showing off a bit, but it was the topic I'd written my thesis on.

"It's the same as the interaction between music and genre, I suppose," she mused. "Musicians make music because it sounds right, we're constantly inventing new sounds because we're chasing these things we hear in our heads. But if you go far enough, someone will come along and say 'oh, you've invented a new genre' and stick a name on it - trip-hop or shoegaze or whatever. And then all these other people will come along and jump on the genre and try to make music that sounds like that, and everyone's pushing at these new sounds. But which came first, the desire to make music that just happens to _sound_ like that, or the concept of the genre and how it should sound, or do they just feed off each other?"

I stared at her, gobsmacked, as we walked along the gallery to the armour hall. How could she have just drawn a conceptual line between my two favourite subjects, so effortlessly? "I had never thought of it like that, but that's a perfect analogy. Absolutely perfect. And that's exactly what I love, both about history and about being a music _fan_ , as opposed to a musician. Working out the categories, the conceptual framework of how it works." I paused, to let her go through the doors ahead of me. "What about you? What was your favourite subject? Music, I guess?"

"No," she said. "Actually, it was maths. How _uncool_ is that?"

"Math?" I wanted to laugh aloud. "What do you love about Math?"

"Because it's the closest we can ever get to perfection." Her eyes shone with the same fierce love I'd felt trying to describe the history of philosophy.

"The world of Platonic ideals, I suppose."

"Something like that. It's all Euclid's fault. Because I fell in love with Geometry in 10th Grade. I loved doing proofs; so simple, so uncomplicated."

"Uncomplicated? Euclidean proofs?" I scoffed. "Man, I was supposed to be good at math - algebra and all that - but Euclid went totally over the top of my head."

"No, it's easy," she insisted, grinning. "So much of life, dealing with people, dealing with boys, it was all so messy and complicated and didn't make any sense. I could never work out the rules. But then with maths, everything was so clear. You just follow this set of logical procedures, you use this set of theorems, this set of axioms, and step by step, all the knots fall out, like pulling on the end of a piece of string, and in the end you have X equals 1 and Y equals 2 and everything is fine."

"I know exactly what you mean. But with boys and girls, you can search forever for the equation that makes X equal me and Y equal you, and never make it work."

She laughed aloud and squeezed my hand. "Precisely."

Hand in hand, I walked her around the armour hall that I had learned every detail of, for an end of year project back in high school. Merry peered into the cabinets and nodded and made appreciative noises like she was actually listening to me, and interested in what I said. I loved the older galleries of the museum, the perfectly even light, the perfectly even temperature, the soft satin sheen of the walls, covered in silken fabrics in neutral tones like forest green and faded red that might once have been wine-coloured. They diffused the light and muffled the sound, and everything was hushed and reverent, the weight of history borne patiently by glass cabinets with dark wooden frames, the smell of dust cut with furniture polish.

Then she walked me through the Medieval Wing, and it was her turn to impress me by pointing out architectural details in the sculptures that helped her pinpoint them to within 50 years and 50 miles of where and when the notecards said they had originated. I read as she peered up at the pale marble saints, and it became a kind of game to see how many she could identify - though she was right about twice as often as she was wrong. She really knew her stuff, like completely obviously, _several years of grad school_ knew her stuff when it came to medieval art. I dunno, she just kept impressing me over and over again. I'd just been blown away by her beauty to start with; I had not expected her to be smart, as well. It was almost too much. But when we wandered upstairs to look through all the paintings, and she tried to rattle off the history of the sitter, or the school of painting, I started to get a bit put out. This was nearly as bad as Dieter. It felt a bit like she was showing off.

"OK, OK, I get it," I told her. "Where'd you go to art school, anyway? SVA? Parsons? I'd have known you if you were an NYU girl."

She shrugged and pulled back, looking at me slightly defensively. "I didn't go to art school. I didn't go to University at all. I taught myself, mostly from books."

"You..." I swallowed hard, wondering if I should laugh and make a joke of it, because, really, in my world, nobody _just didn't go_ to Uni. OK, like Doyle, they might go for a bit and bomb out, distracted by cute girls and strong drink. But the idea that someone might just not go? It was inconceivable. But still, she was looking at me, and hard, with that _look_ like she might be judging me for being an academic snob, instead of me judging her for being an uneducated rube, and I knew I had to say something. "Wow, OK, you've got a pretty pretty impressive body of knowledge for an auto-didact. But I guess for someone who finds Euclid 'easy' you don't need college..." I had intended it as a light-hearted joke, but it backfired, badly.

"My Mum's a university lecturer, so you don't need to patronise me," she said, slightly icily, and turned and walked on.

I chased after her, catching up with her just as she was about to go through a set of double doors leading into a stairwell. Trying to recover after my gaffe, I leaned forward and opened and held the door for her without thinking - then kicked myself for yet another stupid sexist blunder as she smirked at me as she walked past. At the other end, there was another set of doors, so she jogged ahead, and made a big display of holding the door open for me.

Giggling slightly, I bowed, said "Thank you" with impeccable graciousness, and walked through. "Come on, you're not going to give me shit for holding a door for you, are you? Really, I went to NYU; I'm kinda over the whole PC thing."

She laughed again, lightly, and threaded her arm through mine. "I'm kidding. I really don't mind a bit of courtesy, so long as you're happy with accepting the same courtesies in return."

Desperately wanting to backtrack and try the previous conversation over again without coming off like an asshole, I pulled the conversation gently back. "So your Mum's a professor, huh? What University?"

"Williams," she said, with a finality that indicated she didn't want to talk about it any more.

"What's her subject?" I persisted, wanting to show an interest in her family, but really just wanting to know more about how someone could _just not go_ to University if they came from an academic family.

"Art History. With a particular speciality in Dutch and Flemmish painting of the late Renaissance and Early Modern period."

"Ah," I said, feeling like a _muppet_ as we walked through into the Van Dyke room, though I was relieved that she did not drop my arm. "You'll want to skip _this_ particular room, then."

She burst out laughing again, nodded, and we moved through into the Italians. It made me feel good when she laughed at my jokes. Most people didn't catch my sense of humour, dry as it was, and I often felt unfairly tarred with the humourless brush because I didn't leer and quip like Dieter did. It was a good sign if a girl laughed at your jokes, right? Though Merry struck me as the kind of person who laughed a lot, in general. But as the conversation dipped again, I felt a desire to try and balance out her unexpected disclosure with some revelation of my own.

"My family are accountants, see. An appreciation for art is expected, as part of the cultural baggage of the middle classes, but really, an appreciation for the appreciation of art _values_ is held far more important in my family." 

She laughed so hard at that that we actually attracted the attention of a passing guard. "Please step away from the art," he barked, and I ushered her quickly through into the next room.

"You are really very funny," she giggled as we tried to collect ourselves in the next room. "But that's actually kind of sad, when you think about it."

"I know," I sighed. "And an appreciation for rock music... I mean, that's considered beyond the pale."

It was her to turn to look shocked. "Why should rock music and Dutch renaissance painters be any different, in terms of cultural value? Every form of art is unique and important." She squeezed my arm tenderly in sympathy.

"So your parents are OK with you being a musician?"

"It's just me and my Mum. She's OK with whatever makes me happy, really." And then she turned and fixed me with that steady, even gaze that made me feel like I was standing naked before her, that stare that made me both nervous but excited. "Why do you want to be a musician so badly, if your parents are so dead set against it?" A heartbeat's pause as I reeled at the enormity of the question. _Why_? It was the one thing my parents had never asked me. "Or is _that_ the reason why?" She arched an ironic eyebrow.

"No..." I stuttered vaguely. "Mostly I'm a pretty... you know, I like to think of myself as a good son. I'm very loyal. We're a really close family. It's just..." I struggled for words that would not form.

"Come on, you can tell me if you just started playing guitar to meet girls. It's what everyone says, isn't it?" Her eyes sparkled like she was only teasing.

I found my face flushing. "No, actually it wasn't. Though recently, that has turned out to be an enjoyable side effect." Merry laughed and thumped me on the arm as if she didn't believe me. "I don' t know. I just do. Like, one day, I heard a Dead Letters album, and I knew from that day on, that's what I wanted to do with my life. What about you? Why did you want to be a musician?"

"What do you call a girl who hangs out with musicians?" Merry asked, her lips twitching upwards in a naughty smile.

"Hey, come on now," I protested, not wanting to hear any more about groupies, or joining bands to get girls, now that I was on an actual date with an actual girl I had met through my band.

"A bassist!" replied Merry with that adorable little shrug of hers.

"Are you kidding me?"

"No." Her expression suddenly changed, and she looked awfully serious as we walked through from the 18th Century to the 19th. "To be honest, I joined a band because I was so fucking shy."

"You, shy?" I glanced back at her to make sure she wasn't joking.

"Impossibly shy. Terrified of going to clubs, terrified of going to parties. Terrified of even speaking to anyone. I had a best friend in high school - Laura - who always dragged me along to parties, good old fashioned keggers, the kind where you'd have a band playing in the basement and a hundred kids piled in the living room. She wanted to meet guys - and I had the use of my Mum's car. Anyway, at this one party, the band left their equipment unattended between sets, and I just went over and picked up the bass. It only had four strings, so it looked easier, and besides, me and Laura were proper teenage goths, obsessed with The Curse, and Simon Fillup was always my favourite, and he played bass, so I figured bass was coolest. Laura - she knew more than I did about music, she could play a couple of songs by The Curse on the guitar. So we pretended to do a couple of songs, just making a total racket, and I just thudded along on the bass by watching her fingers. She talked them into letting us do an 'opening set' the next time they played, and I guess they let us because we were cute. It was great; I never had to speak to another person at a party again. I just hid behind my bass and played." She shrugged again as if shaking off the serious mood, then grinned, and the familiar light came back into her eyes.

"You don't seem shy, when you're onstage."

"I'm not _me_ , when I'm onstage. Me and Laura, we dreamed up these fake names for our fake band; I was Mary Mary and she was Lorelei. So Mary Mary goes onstage, and wears outrageous clothes, and plays amazing basslines, and, y'know..." She lowered her voice and leaned in slightly closer and I felt my heart flutter. "...calls cute boys from the Lacuna Lounge and asks them out for coffee."

I felt my head spinning, unable to figure out what to do with the flattery, hoping I wasn't blushing too flagrantly, though I could feel my ears growing warm. "I'm... glad that you did?" And as she was looking at me so hopefully, I suddenly felt brave enough to be honest with her. "Do you know why I'm in a band, really?" She nodded, biting her lip. "Well, part of it, you're right. It's the attention. I guess I'm the opposite of you, because when I'm onstage is the one legitimate opportunity I get to jump up and down and go _look-at-me look-at-me look-at-me_ and everyone does. I'm not the kind of guy people normally notice, when I'm walking down the street. I'm kinda shy and a bit reserved to be honest, but onstage, people _notice_ me. I'll make them notice me. But the other half, and probably the bigger half..." I took a deep breath. "When I'm playing music, it's the only time that my head ever... _stops_."

"Stops?" asked Merry, tilting her head to one side.

"It is the only time my brain ever shuts the fuck up. Like, you have no idea how my brain keeps yammering on, all the time. Numbers, figures, words, all these pictures in here, all these people around us, my brain is just like this giant non-stop chatter of random crap. And when I play music, when I pick up my guitar, and I write a song it is like, it's like - boom! - someone has just flicked a switch, and all of that just turns off. My mind is completely clear, I'm totally focused... no, actually, focused is the wrong word. My mind goes blank, and I just... stop thinking. There's just me, and the music, and nothing else. I throw myself at the music, and I just dance like there's nothing else in the world. It's glorious."

"Release us from the tyranny of conscious thought," said Merry.

"What?" I looked up, surprised at how easily she'd expressed something it had taken me 24 years to put into words.

"Sir Thomas Beecham," she supplied. "The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought."

"It's the most powerful drug I know," I said, my voice almost a whisper. "It turns you into someone else, someone new, and it makes me stop being... Well, makes me stop _being_."

"We are getting far too serious," Merry said abruptly. "It's all this early Victorian shit. All these dark paintings, and these serious moralists, it's all so lugubrious. We should get out of here and go back to the rococo. I far prefer all that frou-frou, we need to go back and look for some pastel drapery and cherubs and shit."

"How about the cherubs on the ceilings of Venetian prostitutes' bedrooms? Will that do?"

Her eyes flashed. "It was not a prostitute's room. It was someone's wife's boudoir."

"I bet you she was a courtesan."

"I bet you she wasn't." But now her competitive spirit had been piqued. "Come on, let's go and check." And so we tumbled down the back stairs and meandered around the period rooms until we found the tiny door into the cramped space, and pushed inside. I moved to the end of the plexiglass-walled viewing space while she poured over the explanatory notes. "There. It does _not_ say she was a courtesan."

"It doesn't say she wasn't, either," I pointed out cheekily.

"You're terrible," she hissed, even as she leaned her head back to admire the riot of naked angels splayed across the ceiling.

Suddenly a pair of tourists pushed their way into the room next to us, and Merry and I shrank back into the corner to make space for them. As the tourists snapped photos, I could feel the warmth of her hip, butting up against my groin, and started to feel very, very excited, like my breath was catching in my throat, and I would have been worried an asthma attack was coming on, had it not been for the thumping in my chest and the distinct rush of blood to my crotch.

The tourists left, but Merry did not shift, leaving her hip where it was, the two of us just grinning at one another, neither of us quite daring to move. Was she actually enjoying this as much as I was, the feel of our bodies touching? This would be the perfect moment to move in, to push her hair out of the way, and maybe... kiss her? Did I really dare? But abruptly, the bing-bong of an announcement rang out through the museum, and I glanced down at my watch. Quarter to Five. Had we really been wandering around talking and laughing and joking for five whole hours? A voice droned on in the background, saying that the museum was shutting in fifteen minutes, and Merry's face clouded over with disappointment.

"Guess we have to go," she said quietly, though she made no move to stop pressing up against me.

"Yeah. Do you want to go grab a drink... or get supper..." A wave of recklessness swept over me. "...Or do you want to try to get locked in overnight, so we could maybe make out on the courtesan's bed?"

Her face lit up with amusement and pleasure, and I could hardly believe I'd actually said that aloud, but she was staring back at me, biting her lip as if considering how to respond, when there was a loud buzzing sound from her bag. For several heartbeats, neither of us moved, pushed up against one another as we were, in the tiny corner of the viewing area, but then her bag buzzed again, more insistently.

"What is that? It sounds super-urgent. You better get that if it's a cell phone," I said quietly, though really I wanted to reach out and touch her face, run my finger along those soft pink lips. Or better yet, my tongue.

"My pager," she explained, finally pulling away and digging through her bag until she found it. Squinting at the tiny screen, she scrolled through the messages, then made a face. "I'm sorry. I really need to find a phone booth. Unless you've got a cellie?"

I shrugged and shook my head. "I thought I saw a whole row of them back at the main entrance, near the cloakroom."

She strode off briskly, again, trailing me in her wake. I tried very hard not to eavesdrop on her conversation, but I could tell it was with Elisha. Something about the band, something that sounded important. "What, this evening? Ely, I'm on a date... Yes, a hot date, and a _personal_ date ... Who do you think? ... What time will Gabe be getting there? Can he pick me up on the way? ... A cab? Do you think I'm made of money? ... That important huh. OK, but... Humph. Out of change, bye, Ely."

Walking back towards me, she tried to smile, but her shoulders slumped. "Look, I'm really sorry to do this to you, but..."

"I heard. Your band comes first. Go; it's fine. Really." It was the one excuse I was willing to accept, so I said it like I meant it, and there was no argument from her. "Let me get my coat, I'll walk you to a cab stand." I joined the line, retrieved my parka, then offered my arm as we exited the building. She threaded her hand through the crook of my elbow and together we picked our way down the steps. The snow had picked up again since we'd been inside, and the sidewalks were lightly dusted, everything sparkling slightly in the dusk. Really, I should say something, maybe even try to kiss her goodbye. What was it that Doyle had told me, once, when I'd asked for the secret of his success in dating models? Promises mean nothing. Never let a good date end without extracting a definite time and a place for the next from the girl. "When will I see you again?" I blurted out. "Dinner? Maybe Friday?"

"I'm working Friday, and you have a gig, remember?"

I blushed. So she had actually read the front of the flyer she'd torn in half. "Thursday?"

"Thursday's good. Curry on Sixth Street? Six o'clock good for you?"

"Perfect. Can't wait." I was standing on the step just above her, for once looking down into her face instead of up, wondering if I should ask first, or just try to kiss her without warning. Her eyes twinkled, then abruptly she lunged upwards, brushing her lips ever so lightly across the soft part of my cheek, just above my sideburn, and then she fled, waving backwards as she bounced down the steps to the street and hailed a taxi out of the steady stream of yellow. It took me forever to exhale, a plume of hopeful breath into the icy air, as the snow piled up on the collar of my coat.


	5. So Cruelly You Kissed Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Metropolis search for a new drummer, to little avail. Daniel seeks advice from his bandmates on how to make love to a beautiful woman, but when the moment comes, can a shy, neurotic Smiths fan really rise to the challenge?
> 
> Warning: contains explicit scenes of a sexual nature.

Monday. Back to work. Except I didn't feel that usual leaden groan of having to downshift from an action-packed, gig-fuelled weekend to an exciting day spent alphabetising the A&Rs' weekend gig ticket receipts; I felt invigorated, excited, consumed with nervous energy.

"Good gig, huh?" Andre asked after I made my co-workers all a round of coffee without even being asked.  "Guess Michaels showed up after all?"

"Yup, and yup."

"So when are you handing in your notice, then. Do give me some warning, so I can recruit a new expenses clerk, huh?" Andre teased.

"He didn't sign us. He said we had potential, but we have to find a new drummer before he'd be interested in us."

"So you just have to find a drummer then. Get on the phone, kid. I can tell I'm gonna get no work out of you until you do."

"I know a drummer," volunteered the Polish dude in accounts payable.

"But what kind of music does he play, Sergei?" I sighed long-sufferingly. Really, I knew the guy was only trying to help, but he couldn't tell post-rock from a polka.

"Good music. He is a Rocker. Hard rock, I think, maybe heavy metal? He tells me at the weekend, he is Rocker."

"Yeah, thanks, Sergei. We're gonna try running ads in the Voice again, see if we can find someone more suitable to our style of music?"

"He's the boyfriend of my sister in law, he's new in town, looking for a band to play with. I will ring her and ask for his number, for you."

Great, that was exactly what we needed. Some fresh off the boat Polish metal dude. Dieter would fucking love that. Instead, I got on the phone to the Voice, spelling out the ad we had all voted on and eventually decided. Metropolis was supposed to function like a democracy, but really, when I ended up doing all the work, was it my fault if my vote counted a little more than the others'?

"Drummer wanted," I enunciated slowly down the phone. "Professional, own kit, good look. No, that's LOOK, L-O-O-K. Not luck, look. Regular gigging, industry interest." For a moment I wondered if we should elaborate, because we'd been putting 'industry interest' on our ads since I'd got the job at Windlass. But really, no. We wanted someone with the right aesthetic, not some session hack who just wanted the exposure. "Influences." I paused, as the three of us had debated this one for hours, with Doyle and Dieter nearly coming to blows over it. "The Smiths, Dead Letters, Echo and the Bunnymen. Bunny. Men. All one word. Bunny as in rabbits, men as in... _dudes_. Nick Cave. Leonard Cohen. Tindersticks. Mexican Summers. Kraftwerk." I had no idea why Dieter kept insisting on listing Kraftwerk as influence, we sounded nothing like them, and it gave people the wrong idea that they could turn up with sample pads and MIDI triggers and shit. "Shit, too many words? OK, strike 'own kit' - everyone in the East Village always shares. Is that enough? Fuck it, just take out Kraftwerk and the 'The' from The Smiths. Running this week? Oh, too late. Next week. OK, cheers."

 _Cheers_? I had been hanging out with English people too much.

"That is the band, that is the band my sister in law's boyfriend likes," interrupted Sergei.

"What band?"

"Tindersticks."

"Tindersticks? Are you sure? They're pretty obscure." I had strong doubts that some Polish metalhead would even have heard of Tindersticks, let alone like them.

"I am certain. I like the name; I ask him what it means. Tinder Sticks. He played me some, the singer has a very beautiful voice, very sad, very stoic. Almost Polish. It is good. Your band sounds like this, yes? Maybe I will come and see."

"Our singer loves Tindersticks," I explained, suddenly intrigued by this Tindersticks-loving Polish metalhead. "Tell your sister's boyfriend to come check us out, we're playing on Friday at the Continental."

Doyle had been asking around on his own. He was now working part time at a rehearsal studio in midtown, hauling amps from one room to another for minimum wage, but the perks included free rehearsal space whenever they had drop-outs in the bookings. Because he was in and out of the studios, he often managed to talk to other musicians, checking out who was available for session work, and who was amenable to poaching. Really, I didn't know why we bothered with the Voice ad, it wasn't like we'd ever met anyone good through it. And the freaking weirdoes who called up - I was extremely glad that I'd put Doyle's answering service as the contact number, so it was Doyle who had to wade through messages from washed-up hair metal drummers called "Zebra."

So on Wednesday evening, we abruptly had two auditions lined up, and I had to leave work early and high-tail it down to the semi-industrial wasteland of the low-30s. It's funny how people think Manhattan is all end to end skyscrapers and glitz, but you get these weird patches of underused, decaying warehouses between the avenues. And anywhere that is a bit grotty and has no residential neighbours to complain about the noise, that will instantly be colonised by musicians. The studio was an anonymous, low - well, 5 or 6 story, which is low for New York - brick building with a clattering open freight elevator that scared the shit out of me. I was always convinced it was going to stop between floors so I either had to climb up or wriggle down through some perilous gap. Doyle was already there, tuning his guitar in the narrow but high-ceilinged box of a rehearsal room. They were supposed to be sound insulated, with felt or those weird eggshell Styrofoam baffles stapled all over the walls, but it never worked. You always ended up hearing these ghostly echoes of heavy metal or hip-hop filtering through the walls between the bursts of your own noise, and smelling whether the other musicians were smoking cigarettes or dope. Dieter, astonishingly enough, managed to get there within ten minutes of our allotted start time, so we plugged into the ravaged studio amps with their broken volume knobs and impossible EQ, and mucked about on a new song until the first potential drummer arrived.

I knew as soon as I saw him, that it was just not going to work out. The guy was wearing combat pants, and a sleeveless t-shirt with a brand of cymbals advertised on it, and when he took off his baseball cap, he revealed a long, ratty ponytail. Dieter practically recoiled when he saw it, but Doyle was determined to give the guy a chance. But the game was up as soon as he started playing. Oh god, absolutely not. He was the worst kind of drummer, the showy kind, who kept throwing in fills and little cymbal-rushes at the most inappropriate parts of the song. We tried out three songs with him, running through each one a few times to give the guy a chance to catch on, but I caught Doyle's eye and just shook my head emphatically.

The next guy was better, by comparison, at least. He was a steady, straight ahead 4/4 rock drummer, just simple and solid, and as uncomplicated as we needed. He picked up the songs quickly and easily, which was always good. But the guy was at least 40 years old, and looked it, with lines on his face and cropped, balding hair. OK, so I was not going to hold the guy's age against him, if this really was the best we could get. But after about three songs, it was obvious that he just didn't have the stamina to keep up with the faster songs. Now, I was used to drummers that raced ahead of the beat, and kept speeding up. I was well accustomed to catching Darin's eye and pulling him back, with my almost metronome sense of time. But this guy? He was the first drummer I'd ever played with who actually slowed _down_ halfway through songs. No, this would never do. I caught Doyle's eye and shook my head again, mournfully this time. 

This was hopeless. We were going to be stuck with Darin until the end of time. Well, maybe at least I could keep him sober through the Continental gig, and see how it went.

 

\----------

 

Thursday. I woke with an almost tangible sense of excitement so strong that for a moment I thought it was a holiday. No? Then maybe a gig day? No. Tonight I had a date with That Girl.

I dressed carefully - well, I always dressed carefully, but today I dressed even more carefully than I normally did for work, black suit, black silk shirt, crisp new black tie embossed with tiny, subtly shiny blacker black stripes. I did my hair, though that would be a mess by the evening, and would have to be blow dried out at work, but I kept a spare hairdryer for pre-gig emergencies. Selecting my very best shoes, with the tiny edge of a cuban heel that might give me another inch towards Merry's lips, I slipped them on, exchanged my usual parka for my best fitted wool coat, and caught the train up to work.

"Gig tonight?" asked Andre, when he saw the special tie.

"No, gig is tomorrow," said Sergei with the assurance that made me afraid he might actually turn up.

"Hot date tonight," teased Andre, and I flushed bright red. "For real, dog? You, on a date?"

"I... _date_ ," I sputtered, though to the best of my knowledge, until this weekend, neither Andre nor I had been on a single proper dinner date since I'd started working there. Andre, it was true, had rotten luck with women, and besides, he was married to his job. But me? I was too busy to date. Sure I had been a late bloomer; I hadn't even kissed a girl until Junior year of high school, during that eventful summer in Berlin with Doyle. Senior year, I had acquired an actual, honest to god steady girlfriend at a social dance with Dalton, solely on account of my guitar playing skills, but then Yvonne had been accepted to Stanford, and there was no way I was having anything to do with California, so that was the end of that.

My freshman year at NYU, then, I had started _dating_ , properly. Because for the first time in my life, I had discovered that I didn't have to give up playing guitar and collecting records and caring about the UK chart placements of obscure British bands in order to date art school kinds of girls. But then, towards the end of my Freshman year, I had got talking to that tall, skinny kid with the asymmetrical haircut and the 14-hole Doc Martens, and once Dieter had come into my life, girls had... well, girls had fallen by the wayside, in favour of our _band_.

It wasn't that I didn't have crushes. I still nursed crushes, on girls at NYU, on girls in the music scene, maybe even girls at my work. (Had I maybe had a little bit of a crush on Bebe Newcolm when I first met her? OK, she was old enough to be my mother, but still. Total MILF, and _so_ crushable with her silver-fox bob and her encyclopaedic knowledge of music.) But the problem was, as a small, skinny, awkward boy with a crooked nose, next to Dieter, I just _evaporated_. Merry was by no means the first girl I'd had a crush on in the past 3 years. But she seemed to be the first girl, give or take a couple of unfortunate drunken one-night stands after gigs, in about 3 years that actually appeared to _like me back_.

I was terrified.

In a dodgy Irish bar on the corner of 30th St, after the previous night's auditions, I had delicately tried to pump Doyle for advice, but of course Dieter had caught my drift and jumped in with contradictory, and almost certainly unhelpful advice of his own, just as much to scrap with Doyle as to advise me. 

"You should be mysterious," Doyle had told me. "Girls like a bit of mystery. Don't make yourself too available. Make her come after you. Y'know, like, don't return every single one of her phone calls, make her chase you a bit. Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen."

I had just frowned. After Merry's thing with the flyer, I wasn't sure this was such a good approach. "Well, it's a bit late for not returning her phone calls, considering we're meeting tomorrow..."

"He is not yet at the not-calling-her-back stage," Dieter interrupted. "You have to hook the fish before you can play the fish on the line. What you need to do now is impress her. You are still at the _Wow Her_ stage."

"Wow her?" I echoed. How the hell did anyone _wow_ a girl like Merry? Merry was, like, the literal embodiment of _wow_ incarnate. One did not wow Merry; one simply was wowed by Merry. Hopelessly wowed.

"Wow her," repeated Dieter. "Impress her with your knowledge. Now is your chance to show off a little bit, Daniel. Zing her with that philosophy degree of yours, show off your knowledge of Foucault and Derrida. Especially if you can work in a bit of Feminism in there. There is nothing that girls like more than if you can prove to them that you understand the inner workings of their lives better than they do. That really drives 'em wild."

"I don't know that Merry is into philosophy, so much," I hedged. "She's more..." I cast about wildly for the few things I had gleaned about Merry on our one and only date, apart from the fact that she was secretly really shy, and loved The Curse, and was obsessed with maths, and her best friend in high school had been called Laura, and how much she dug Persian carpets and medieval saints and really I didn't know the first thing about her at all, except her mother was a professor of... "...Art History. That's more her kinda thing. She's an Art History kinda girl, I think."

"Art History. Hmmmmm," mused Dieter, tapping his lips thoughtfully. "I can lend you my Ernst Gombrich, but you're going to have to speed read to get through that by tomorrow..."

"It's hopeless," I said, putting my face into my hands.

"What's the problem, Danny-Boy?" chuckled the ancient bartender, coming over to sweep our table clear of empty beer glasses and peanut shells. No one knew his real name; everyone in the place just shouted 'Paddy' to get his attention.

"Daniel has a date tomorrow," Doyle explained, not even waiting until Paddy had put the fresh batch of peanuts down to start raiding it. When Effie wasn't in town, I suspected it was sometimes his only meal of the evening.

"A date," whistled Paddy, thumping me on the shoulder. "Just be yourself, laddy, that's always the best option, when dealing with the young ladies."

I raised my head and stared at the older man, looking at his ruined face, speckled with burst veins, and tried to imagine Paddy ever knowing the slightest thing about young ladies. "Just be myself?" I did my best to think about who _myself_ was, and confronted only a mess of swirling thoughts about guitar tone, whether I should change to a lighter gauge of strings, various Windlass bands' chart positions, how on earth I was ever going to find a drummer and my current, somewhat stalled plans for Metropolis' world domination. "That is the worst advice I've had yet."

So I was on my own.

As soon as work was over, I brushed my teeth, re-wet and blow dried the waves out of my hair, straightened my good tie, then took a taxi down to Sixth St, just for 6 on the dot. Now this was a problem. I'd agreed a time and place with Merry, but neither of us had even mentioned a restaurant. So there I was, stuck on the corner of Second Avenue, desperately scouting up and down through the waves of commuters, for the shiny banner of her hair, before giving up and just staring down the cross street, in the general direction of the subway.

"Danny!" I heard my name, and turned, just in time to see her coming the opposite way, skipping down the avenue instead of walking across from the street. She looked like some kind of mythical beast, in that ridiculous fuzzy blue coat, her yellow hair and a purple scarf streaming out behind her, darting between traffic as she crossed the road. And then suddenly she was upon me, throwing her arms around my neck and embracing me, though I didn't quite dare to keep my grip around her waist when she pulled away, the way Blandford had. "Sorry I'm late," she gushed. "I was boiling my bass strings, and had to find a place to hang them up to dry..."

"Boiling your bass strings?" I asked, wondering if I should take her hand.

"Yeah, I read it in an old interview with James Jamerson. I really, really want to get that beautiful, soft Motown bass tone, because it's just the most amazing sound. So apparently, he never, ever changed his strings unless they broke? But I read that if you boil old strings, it gets the gunk off, so... I boiled." She shrugged prettily.

"Wow," I said, feeling absolutely amazed to be on a date with a girl who had even heard of James Jamerson, let alone cared about his bass tone. "Do you use flat wound strings, as well?" I asked, trying to show off my own technical knowledge a little. "Or do you find round wound strings brighter?"

"Flat wound, oh yeah!" Her eyes sparkled. "Really hard to get 'em for a six string bass, but totally worth it, for the vintage sound. Ely is always saying I should just give up and get round wound strings, but Ely... no. Wait." Abruptly she stopped herself and smiled apologetically. "Oh god, listen to me rattling on about my band and my guitar strings and bass tone and all this shit like a total fucking dork. I promised myself. No band talk tonight."

I just grinned at her. "You can talk about your band all you like. I don't think there's anyone in New York City who wants to talk about bands, more than I do, tonight," I assured her, suddenly seeing the unexpected wisdom of Paddy's advice to just be myself, swirling thoughts about guitar strings and band politics and all.

"Are you sure?"

"Promise." I took her hand and squeezed it, as we set off together down Sixth Street. Pretty much all of the Indian restaurants on lower Manhattan were clustered on the one block, spilling the scent of cumin and cardamom out into the cold night air, waiters popping out of their doors as couples walked past, trying to lure us into the warm, golden interiors with the promise of tasty treats to come. "Do you have a favourite restaurant? One of the basement ones with the sitar players, maybe?"

"No, let's go to Milon. I like the music, but if we're going to talk, I want to hear you." So we walked down the street, past the smiling musicians sitting behind huge glass windows, beaming their welcome out into the street along with their tabla beats. She lead me right to the end of the street, until I was almost afraid we'd gone too far, until she grinned and lead me round the corner. "Have you been to this one?" I shook my head. "Be prepared. It's kinda... dazzling."

We climbed the stairs and the door opened in a wave of heat and light and the odour of delicious food, a smiling waiter beckoning us inside. But as we walked in, I had to resist the urge to duck, and cover my head, so disorienting was the whirl of colour and light. Most of the restaurants up Sixth Street were decorated with gaudy strings of christmas tree lights, but the Milon was plastered from wall to ceiling to wall, not a single inch of bare space that wasn't covered with tinsel or glitter or blinking lights, gold and silver and purple and red and orange and pink.

"Can we sit in the window?" Merry asked, and the waiter bowed, then showed us to the table with the easy graciousness shown a regular. "Are you alright?" she asked, as I bent my head and ducked under a string of glowing chilli peppers to my seat. "You look a bit shocked."

"You're really into the sensory overload thing, aren't you? It's a bit like having dinner in the cockpit of a burning aeroplane," I quipped, but she just smirked.

"Burning airlines give you so much more," she sang softly, and my heart leapt. I was having dinner with a girl who quoted obscure Eno quotes. "Trust me, the food here is worth it... Oh, thanks." The waiter deposited a plate of papadums and chutneys and handed out menus.

"You're going to have to help me with this," I bent forward to whisper. "What here is OK for vegetarians?"

"You're a vegetarian?" she asked, surprised, and I nodded. "Me too." She paused, as she pointed to the appropriate section of the menu, and I noticed little green triangles next to certain dishes. "Meat Is Murder?"

"As in the Smiths album?" I replied, then, seeing her eyebrows shoot up over the top of her menu, nodded sheepishly. "Yeah. That."

"Oh my god," she said. "I am having dinner not just with an actual heterosexual male Smiths fan, but a vegetarian male heterosexual Smiths fan who gave up meat because of that album. Are you for real?"

"I'm not entirely sure right now, but that might just be the lights." I smiled at her and moved the strand of glowing plastic peppers out of the way that I could see her more clearly, the red and golden lights playing across her face.

I ordered bottles of beer while we waited for our meal, and the waiter brought two absolutely enormous litre bottles of Cobra, deadly strong. 

As I opened her bottle and poured it for her, I gently pushed her back towards the subject of bands, wondering if it really was OK with her to talk about bands as much as I really liked to talk about bands. Girls often said they were fine with discussing the music business, but then when it came down to it, their eyes would glaze over with boredom, and I would know that I was just being tolerated. "So who do you hate most in your band? I'll tell you if you tell me."

"I don't hate anyone in my band," she laughed, raising her glass to toast me. "Though honestly, I can't even fucking imagine what it's like to be in a band with Dieter."

I bristled. Please, dear god, let me not spend the evening talking to another beautiful girl about Dieter. "Believe it or not, Dieter is not the most difficult person in my band." She snorted her disbelief, and it actually seemed convincingly genuine, not like those girls who told him Dieter was ' _annoying_ ' and then ended up fucking him anyway at the end of the evening. "I know why I find him super-difficult, but why do you hate him so much? And what on earth did you say to him at that Lacuna Lounge gig? I've never seen anyone knock him back so effectively."

"Ha!" She put down her drink and smirked across the table, her eyes sparkling as if she was trying to make up her mind about whether to tell me something, and panic whirled momentarily in the pit of my stomach. "Alright, might as well tell you. See, I used to be in an all-girl post-punk covers band called Echo and the Bunnygirls. We played the Loser Lounge and Don Hill's a couple of times, doing, like covers of Echo, The Curse, Dead Letters, Siouxsie, that sort of thing... while, dressed as Playboy Bunnies."

"Playboy Bunnies," I repeated, my lips twitching up into what I hoped was not a lascivious grin, despite myself. "Like, bunny-ears and tails?"

"Yes. Bunny-ears, fishnets, corsets, dickie-bows, the whole nine yards," Merry laughed, her face flushing slightly, though that might have just been the potent Indian beer. "It started as kind of a joke when we played a Halloween party, but it became kind of our gimmick. People loved it. We got way more attention playing gigs in Playboy Bunny outfits than we ever did in our street clothes."

"Wow," I said, not sure which part I was more impressed by. For a moment, I squinted at her, trying to imagine her in a Playboy bunny-suit, and found myself starting to get a stiffie.

"So Dieter used to come to all our gigs..."

"Of course he did. Hot damn, so relevant to _all_ his interests." I took another sip of beer and tried to will my erection to disperse.

"He got with Laura, our guitarist, first. She always had an... eye for a bit of trouser, shall we say. Then they had a threesome with Taylor, our drummer, because, well... Taylor was always a bit bi-curious, and Laura had this crazy idea that the band that _sleeps_ together stays together, so the three of them getting involved would make Taylor less likely to quit and go find another band. And Taylor apparently thought Dieter was quite an incentive."

"Did it work?" I cocked my head, considering this. I had never even considered using sexual politics to keep a drummer from straying. Did I even know any gay drummers? And could I, actually, bring myself to suck some guy's cock to get them to play drums for our band? At that point, I was so desperate for a decent drummer, I wasn't entirely sure I could honestly dismiss the idea out of hand.

"Did it, fuck," snorted Merry disdainfully. "Because the moment that Taylor and Laura were both banging him, suddenly Marla, our singer, decided that she had to have him. Even though we were just a shitty covers band, there was always that stupid fucking tension between Laura and Marla, as to who was the _star_ of the group. So Marla fucked Dieter away from Laura, just to prove that she could. And the fucking band broke up when Laura found out - just to make certain that Marla had won the battle, but lost the war. So Laura quit and joined the Motivators, and I... followed. Because we could always find another chick singer, but we could never find another female lead guitarist."

I stared at her, astonished. In all my annoyance at the way that Dieter treated fucking girls like an Olympic sport, and wanted him to get found out and kicked to the curb, I had never even considered the idea that the girls might be playing their own games, using Dieter as some kind of benchmark.

"It's the opposite with dudes," I shrugged. "Guitarists are a dime a dozen, but decent singers are like hen's teeth."

"You're being a bit uncharitable to yourself there?" she teased me, flirting at me over the top of her beer glass. "You're a pretty _hot damn_ good guitarist..." A split second pause. " ...for a guy."

"Ha!" I laughed, though she nudged me gently in the shin to prove she was joking, and I squirmed under the table and caught her foot between my legs to stop her from kicking me again.

"But don't worry about Dieter. I told him it'd be a cold day in hell before he ever got around to _completing the set_ , as it were. Besides, he's not all that as a bassist. He can't even play The Back Of Love properly."

"Oh my god," I giggled, with my hand over my mouth. "I was wondering why he kept trying to play that at soundchecks last year. You're right - he can do the fast, fiddly bit fine, but he falls down every time when he tries to hit the groove."

"I can play it perfectly," she assured me, holding my gaze as she moved her foot to the side slightly and pushed up under my trousers, rubbing her nylon-covered leg against the bare skin of my shin. OK, that erection was going nowhere.

And so we talked - well, we bitched, really - about our bands for an hour and a half. Merry complained about Elisha, who apparently was a bit of a nightmare, and prone to diva-tantrums, and then I complained about Darin, and then we both complained about the various venues in the East Village and the expensive rehearsal studios and the competitive rat race of the other bands, and that endless, eternal pressure - _are you signed yet_? Merry was hungry, I could see it in her eyes, she wanted it as much as I did. She fussed about it, and shrugged dismissively when she talked about it, but really, it was obvious she obsessed about getting a record deal in a way that made me feel... I dunno, like I was not such a freak for caring about this stuff. I didn't ever have to explain to Merry why being in a band was important to me, why getting a record deal was important to me, why _making it_ was important to me. She already knew; it held the same importance in her life.

As we ate, we started comparing guitars and amplifiers and tuner pedals, and Fender versus Gibson and Marshall versus Vox, and whether Russian Big Muffs or American Big Muffs were better. (Come on, Russian; as if it's even close.) And as we started helping ourselves to each others' food to try to finish the meal, we argued about the sound quality of CDs versus vinyl (My god, Merry loved vinyl nearly as much as I did!) And I thought idly about other dates I'd been on over the past 3 years, and realised exactly where I'd been going wrong. I needed a girl that not just knew, but cared about the difference between round wound and flat wound strings. I needed a girl that understood what A&R meant, and what royalties and points on a record were. I needed a girl who knew what compression was, and how a good recording could make the difference between a flat, lifeless song, and a dense, sparkling song that leapt up off the turntable the moment you dropped the needle. I needed a girl like Merry. And from the way Merry's eyes lit up and stayed sparkling, as the conversation wound from the technical to the creative to the business side and back, I thought that maybe, just maybe, Merry needed someone like me.

We finished our dinner - delicious, as promised, though I had barely noticed the food, in amidst all that conversation - and stumbled out into the night, with me clutching my stomach and groaning, pretending that I'd eaten far too much food, though she hadn't even been able to finish her dosa. "Do you want to go on somewhere for a drink?" I offered, anxious not to let the evening end.

"Yes, I would like a drink," she insisted, and pulled me down the road to a friendly bar, where she ordered two brandies, just to keep the chill off. "But what I really want, right now, is ice cream."

"Ice cream? In this weather?" It was bitterly cold, so I moved closer to her in the booth, as much to stay warm as to feel the heat of her intimacy.

"That's exactly the point. You eat ice cream, and it makes you feel warmer by comparison."

"I probably shouldn't tell you this, then. But there is supposed to be... down on Second Street somewhere, an ice cream cocktail bar."

Her eyes grew huge, and she sunk the rest of the brandy and stood up. "Oh my god, Danny, let's go."

I finished my own drink and followed her out into the cold, cursing the wool coat which might have looked good, but was nowhere near as warm as my parka. Down the avenue and along Second Street, we found the bar, which was almost deserted, and browsed through the menu. "Creme de menthe chocolate chip," suggested Merry.

"White Russian milkshake," I countered. "I am definitely having that."

"OMG, Banana Split daiquiri. No, wait... Cherry Vanilla. That is my favourite flavour of ice cream in the whole world."

We ordered two sickly sweet creations and carried them through into a sparsely populated back room where we huddled together under a heater, trying to drink our sundaes before they melted, though not quite sure whether to use a straw or a spoon. Merry soon had whipped cream on her nose, which I, again, wiped off with a napkin. "Not using spit and polish this time?" she teased.

With the vodka of my white russian coursing through my veins, I was feeling quite audacious. "I can think of better ways to give you my saliva."

"Can you?" she wrapped her lips around her straw and sucked, even as she raised one eyebrow naughtily.

Raising my glass to my face, I dipped my whole face in gently, and emerged with a tiny spot of ice cream on the tip of my own nose. Merry put down her drink on a ledge, then leaned forward, gingerly extended her pink kittenish tongue, and licked the ice cream off my nose. It tickled, slightly, but it was so distinctly erotic that I felt a shiver go down my spine. I raised the glass again, and this time, dipped my mouth in, so that there were drops of milkshake clinging to my lower lip. Merry smiled saucily, moved closer, put one hand on each of my shoulders, then moved closer and gently licked the ice cream from my lips, though she didn't move her face away from me afterwards. I couldn't stand it, having her so close and not touching her, so I gently let my lips part, admitting her searching tongue, then suddenly one of my hands was on the small of her back, pulling her towards me as we kissed, deeply, hungrily, the taste of ice cream and vanilla and cherry soda mingling in our mouths. My other hand was lifting, tangling in her hair, the unexpected weight of it, silky smooth, and god, the skin of her face so soft, her tongue strong and in control, like she was guiding me, telling me what she wanted me to do to her.

And then suddenly she pulled away, grinning at me with those sea green eyes as she perched back on her barstool and picked up her drink, sipping it daintily as if she had not just had her tongue down my throat.

"Hot damn," I said.

"Hot damn," she agreed, and for a moment, we just stared at one another. Unless I blew it, this was going to happen. But I had no idea how to take it to the next step, or even ask her to lead me. Did I lean forward, put my hand on the gentle swell of her breast and then... what? Christ, what would Dieter tell me to do? I had no clue how to seduce a girl like this; I was just putty in her hands.

"Sorry guys, drink up. Since you're the only customers in here, we're gonna close up early," announced the bartender, breaking the spell.

I swallowed the rest of my White Russian milkshake quickly, but Merry put her hand to her forehead as she bolted down her cherry vanilla float. "Oh my god, ice cream headache."

"I'm sorry," I laughed as we handed the glasses back to the bartender and made our way back to the freezing cold street. "So what do you want to do? Do you want to go on somewhere else, or..." I steeled myself to dare suggest it. "Or pick up a bottle of something and go back to my place? No bouncers there."

"Your place," she agreed quickly, and took my hand as we headed off down the avenue. We stopped at a bodega and noting her sweet tooth, I nipped in for a bottle of some sweet white desert wine while Merry smoked outside. But as I emerged, she stopped me, and looked in my face earnestly. "Danny, you are going to try to shag me, right?"

" _What_?" I sputtered, utterly wrong-footed by the directness of the question. "Merry, I... uh... wow."

Her brow furrowed and she looked worried. "So, am I reading this wrong? You're not interested? I got the wrong idea with the whole kissing thing...?"

"No," I protested, and her face fell. "No, I am _interested_. Especially after the kissing thing. Just... Hot damn. You're very direct. I'm not used to direct."

"So, in inviting me to your flat, you are going to try to shag me?"

"Probably," I found myself croaking, from between dry lips. "If you don't... have any, uh, objections..."

"Right, because I'm really particular about condoms. I'm allergic to all kinds of latex and most forms of spermicide, so if you're going to shag me, I need to go to Duane Reed or somewhere and see if I can get the right sort, because I'm not on the Pill."

"OK, then," I just about managed to squeak. "We should do that. There's an all night pharmacy over on First."

And as I stood outside, waiting for her, I quietly panicked inside. Was it really going to be that easy? Were we really going to have sex, just like that, one dinner and two drinks? Well, not counting the bottle of wine. But, really? Would I be able to get it up? Well, of course I was going to be able to get it up; I was already hard and had been continuously since about halfway through dinner, my cock straining through my underpants to the silk lining of my suit trousers, so that I had to constantly surreptitiously adjust myself. But would I be able to keep it up, and not just explode the moment I got inside her? Would I _ever_ be able to satisfy a girl like that? And what about these weird condoms of hers? I'd never even thought about something like being allergic to condoms. What if _I_ broke out in a rash? Stress could sometimes do terrible things to my skin, and what if she thought it was some kind of terrible social disease? And then suddenly she reappeared, smiling and carrying a small brown paper bag. "Everything alright?" I forced myself to say with a jaunty grin.

"We're good. Let's go back to yours." She took my hand again, and together we dodged the traffic lights and ran across the wide 4-lane desert of Houston Street, to the shelter of Ludlow Street, laughing at our own boldness.

She teased me as she chased me up the four flights of uneven steps to my apartment, pretending to pinch me in the bum through my tight trousers. I grinned sheepishly and blushed and pretended to swat her away, but secretly, felt my excitement rising. The impossible seemed to be true. Merry actually appeared to _want_ me, nearly as much as I wanted her. When I reached the top, I unlocked my door, pulled her inside, then pushed her up against the wall and kissed her again, more insistently, almost roughly, and she clung to me hungrily, grabbing my lapels and pulling me against her. Yes, this could really happen; we could really do this. I put the bottle of wine down on top of an amp, and started to explore inside her coat, with my fingertips. Waist, slim and firm, yes, then sliding down to her buttocks, soft and rounded, yielding slightly to my touch, like her body actually felt as good as she looked. Breasts, oh god yes, breasts, her nipple coming alive in my left hand as my tongue searched her mouth. I was tempted to bend down and clasp my lips to her breast, but I pulled away, panting, surprised by the wildness in her eyes as she looked back at me.

"Was that the kind of... 'trying to shag you' that you had in mind?" I asked gently.

"Yeah, that was about it." She was actually trying to catch her breath, her cheeks flushed as she pushed her hair out of her face, staring at me like she wanted to devour me. I decided I actually liked feeling the weight of the desire in her eyes upon me. It made me feel powerful, sexy.

"Shall I pour the wine?" I offered, shedding my coat then accepting hers before hanging them both in the hall cupboard. She nodded, as if barely trusting her voice, and I picked up the bottle of wine and carried it through into the kitchen. Corkscrew. Where the fuck had that bastard Dieter hidden the corkscrew? I heard Merry go into the bathroom next door, and softly lock the door. There it was, in the wrong drawer, with the cutlery. I found two glasses, filled them, put the cork back in the bottle and the bottle back in the fridge so it didn't spoil, then carried them through into the living room. Where was she? Had she changed her mind, got cold feet?

No, there she was over by my record collection, drawn like a moth to the vinyl, looking even more beautiful than I had dreamed, as she bent to peer at the spines. I kicked off my shoes, then walked over beside her, handed her the other glass of wine, then flicked through my records until I found a suitable album. Echo and the Bunnymen - Ocean Rain. She smiled as soon as she saw the album cover, the deep cobalt blue, the shimmering fairy-cave of the album art promising delights to come as I flipped the record onto my turntable and tipped the needle onto it.

I had deliberately put on Side Two first, those magical first chords of _The Killing Moon_ spilling out into the silence between us, and Merry opened her eyes wide. "Oh my god, I love this song. I think it's my favourite of theirs. How did you know?"

"Lucky guess? It is their best album, after all." I smiled at her and took a nervous gulp of my drink, trying not to stare. Did she know, how she sparkled, when she stood under the halogen light just like that? No, it was just her dress that was shimmering, a short black velvet number that hugged her curves. I had been so nervous that I had barely even noticed what she'd been wearing earlier, just relieved that she'd turned up. And now, after accepting a generous quaff of wine, she was reaching up behind her back and unfastening it. Oh my god.

"Can you help me?" she asked, and turned to present her back to me, and I noticed for the first time, a long silver zipper down the length of her spine. For a moment, I just stared, then I saw her tugging at it, and realised I was meant to unzip her. With thick, fumbling hands that felt like they belonged to someone else, I put down my glass, and obliged, watching her pale skin appear beneath the velvet like the soft flesh of a ripe fruit. As she turned back around, I reached for my wine, and wanted to chug the whole glass to calm my nerves, but no, I had no desire to be drunk and incapable. But she just smiled, and without taking her eyes from mine, slipped the dress off her shoulders, let it fall to the ground, and stepped out of it.

"Oh christ," I murmured to myself, trying not to stare, though honestly, what was I supposed to do. Was this my life? ' _Under blue moon I saw you, so cruelly you kissed me_ ,' sung Echo and the Bunnymen in the background, as, swaying slightly to the music, a half naked goddess stood in the centre of my tiny studio flat, wearing a black push-up bra, a pair of black tights and little else. She moved towards me, and I couldn't help it, I reached up and kissed her, and no matter how many times we kissed, I was still surprised to find her kissing me back eagerly, wrapping her arms around my neck and pulling me towards her. Her bare skin slid against the fabric of my suit and I wrapped my arms around her, touching the small of her back, the shiny nylon of her tights, the lace of her bra.

"Why are you still wearing all this?" she asked as she pulled away, then tugged at the buttons of my my jacket, and relieved me of it, hanging it casually off the back of a chair. I raised my hands to unfasten my tie, but she shook her head, and loosened it, then pulled it slowly, teasingly away from my neck so softly that it felt like a caress. She unbuttoned my waistcoat, slid that off my shoulders, admiring the feel of my silk shirt against her fingers, then discarded that on the chair, too. And then she started to unbutton my shirt, leaving a tiny lingering kiss at each inch of pale skin she exposed. Down, she worked, pulling the silk out of the way, a kiss on my solar plexus, a kiss on my stomach, a teasing tongue in my belly button, and then, christ, she was moving lower, sinking to her knees as she unfastened my belt and unbuttoned my trousers. "This is what you want, right?" she asked, her eyes meeting mine and flashing with mischief.

"Yes," I just about managed to hiss, and suddenly I felt her mouth close around my cock, and I was lost. The rest of my body seemed to melt away. For what felt like forever, I could focus on nothing but the pleasure of her wet mouth lapping away at me between my legs. Without realising what I was doing, I tangled my fingers in her hair, barely remembering to breathe as she sucked me, feeling my excitement building until I had to tug at her gently and move her away. "You need to stop that, now, if you want me to be any good to you later on." 

She laughed softly and climbed to her feet. I wanted that bra off her, and fumbled with the fastening until her breasts poured out into my hands. I bent my head to her and kissed each nipple gently, pulling them to attention as I sucked them into my mouth. She arched her back, pushing them towards me, then reached over and took another sip of wine. 

"Come on, lie down with me here," I urged, trying to calm down. She followed me as I lead her to the sofa, and pulled her down on top of me. My cock felt cold, out in the open air with her saliva drying on me, and I was grateful for the warmth of her body as we twined our legs together, mouths meeting as we started to hump one another. It was too much, just holding her. I wanted to be inside her, but I had no idea where those condoms had gone, so I just moved myself back and forth against the fabric of her tights.

"Is this your bed? Does it fold out so we can fuck more comfortably?" she asked. I was starting to get used to her forthright habit of directness.

"No, my bed's up there." I pointed to the opposite side of the room, the loft bed above my desk, which she clearly hadn't noticed before.

"Shall we go up?"

"Are you in a hurry? I thought it would be nice to just... cuddle for a bit." It had been some time since I had just lain on my sofa with a naked girl in my arms, and I wanted to savour it. Not to mention the, um, performance anxiety, trying to calm myself down, though really my cock wanted to go off at that moment, against her silky black tights.

"Actually, yeah, I'm in a hurry."

"Why? Are you that randy?" I teased, hoping she would recognise the British meaning of the phrase.

"Kinda. Yeah. But also... you know the first time you have sex with a new person, it's always a bit awkward and a bit shit. So I want to get it over with, having awkward first-time sex with you right now, and then go on to have better sex tomorrow, and amazing sex the day after that."

I actually burst out laughing, partly from the bluntness I was starting to find funny instead of astonishing, but also partly from excitement that at the idea that whatever we were about to do was something she planned on doing to me the next day, and the day after that, as well. And to be honest, yeah, more than a tiny bit of relief that she did not actually expect me to be Superman during our first time together, despite my first night nerves. After the few shitty, dissatisfying one-night-stands I'd had after Lacuna gigs, I was just grateful that someone could acknowledge that first-time sex could be, y'know, a bit awkward and weird and not the mind-blowing mega-party that Dieter had lead me to expect. "Alright, Merry. Let's go and have shitty sex in my loft bed." And with that, I slapped her gently on the thigh and let her climb off me.

As she located the precious brown paper bag and climbed up the ladder to the loft bed, I carefully removed my trousers, smoothed them down, folded them and draped them across the top of my suit jacket, taking care not to crease anything. Then I picked up my tie off the floor and hung it over the back of the chair, and did the same thing with my shirt. Walking over to the stereo, I flipped the record over, then followed the girl up to bed as Ian McCulloch crooned _Swung from a chandelier; my planet sweet on a silver salver_. Her tights were gone, and my eyes lingered for a moment on the small patch of light coloured hair between her legs. Natural; what a hippie. But I liked her better natural, I thought, as I crawled my way over to her and collapsed into her arms, showering her face with kisses.

Sex. It was usually time out of time for me, rather like those rushing, momentous blank spaces where I knew gigs had taken place. But with Merry, for some reason, I stayed _present_ with Merry, and not necessarily in a bad way, but in a tingling, super-conscious, aware of every molecule of my body kind of way, because every place that her body touched mine, I felt alive. She slipped the fancy organic condom onto me, though really it didn't feel much different than a regular one. OK the thicker rubber deadened my sensation a bit, but I was already so excited that to be frank, I needed a bit of deadening, so I didn't just blow it the moment I got inside her. And then she swallowed me between her legs like a second mouth. I moaned aloud and clung to her, feeling her tight wetness cleave to me, then started to move, pushing against her, and feeling her push back against me. 

I'll be honest, I was nervous. Women scare me a little, beautiful women frighten me a lot, and Merry, in truth, Merry completely terrified me. I kept waiting for my mind to switch off, for instinct to take over, and it just didn't. I wanted to throw myself into her, like I threw myself into my music, to give myself over completely to physical sensation, to shut out the howl of nervousness, but it didn't work. I couldn't shut off and just _be_. What if she realised how scant the variety of my sexual experience really was, what if I couldn't satisfy her, what if the condom, my erection, a million little things went wrong? Oh christ, her breast slipping across my chest, her nipple unexpectedly hard; that stilled the mental chatter and pulled me suddenly back to my body. To her body. I raised my hand and touched her flesh, pulling at that erect nipple. Christ, her breast was so firm, but her skin was so soft.

She moaned, and loudly. "Sorry," I whispered, and giggled lightly, not that it was funny, I was just stiff with nerves.

Opening her eyes, she smiled at me, her expression lighting up with mischief and excitement. "You know what's amazing?" I shook my head, grinning up at her hopefully. "If you do this...  oh my god, yes..." She took my hand and moved it, to the underside of her breast, showing me how to cup it in my hand, answering my unspoken questions about whether it was better to squeeze or twist by the volume and strength of her moans. Squeeze her breast, but twist her nipple, rubbing it gently between thumb and forefinger, that got the best audio response. It was no different than learning how to nudge up the distortion on my guitar pedals, on some basic level, by sound and touch and how she moved against me.

I fear I was probably a clumsy lover, those first nights, but she was a patient teacher, and I was an eager student, almost too desperate to please her. Yet it never felt like dictation, it felt like a fun game that she was teaching me the rules of as we went along. She made it all feel like a breathless experiment, a naughty exploration, with her whispered urges of "Oh my god, Danny, what if we tried it like this..." before pulling her hapless but enthusiastic companion into another erotic adventure. I never felt like she was actively trying to boost my confidence, and yet she did. She took a shy, nervous child, with a head full of guitar pedals and whispered Smiths lyrics, and turned me into a man. A man capable of satisfying a goddess like Merry.

Merry beneath me, her hair splayed out across my pillows as I pumped into her from above. Merry beside me, the two of us spooning gently, my cock still slipping back and forth inside her as we caught our breaths. And then Merry above me, straddling me, her shoulders slumped against the low roof, my hands cupping her breasts and playing with her nipples as I felt her grinding her pubic bone against me. She took my hand and thrust it between her legs, showing me exactly where to rub, and I rubbed for all I was worth, in time with her shortening breaths. Her face churned with agony, her beautiful mouth twisted into a grimace, and for a moment I was terrified I was hurting her, until I realised from the shortness of her breath, and that weird staccato rhythmic panting, going "ah, ah, ah, aaaah..." that she was actually coming.

"Danny," she said, as she opened her eyes wide, and an expression of bliss broke out across her face, then she slowly stilled her bucking hips.

"I've got you."

"Are you going to...?"

"I've been holding off for about 20 minutes." I prided myself on being a considerate lover, deferring my own pleasure. "Come here," I directed, pulling her down beside me.

"Well, come on, then," she ordered, her eyes flashing with mischief, and I laughed as she started to pump against me again.

"Give me a minute..." I looked into her eyes, enjoying the peace and pleasure reflected back at me for a long moment, then launched myself heedless into my own orgasm. And then, finally, the whirling thoughts stopped, and I found peace.


	6. Can We Get More "Suck" In The Monitor, Please?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel tries to balance his new girlfriend, having a demanding dayjob, and playing shitty no-hope fourth-on-the-bill gigs on St Mark's Place. Something has to give, as things finally come to a head with Darin the dead-beat drummer.

I woke early, while the sky outside was still dark, glanced at the clock and saw it read 5am. Still another three hours until I would have to get up and go to work, but I found it hard to sleep with another body heavy in the bed. Merry. Shifting slightly, I pushed her hair gently out of her face and stared down at this beautiful woman lying beside me, tracing her cheekbones, her lips, the sharp point of her chin. Beauty confounded me, I never knew quite what it was that made a woman attractive, whether it was art or bone structure or just the animating spirit that lit up her eyes. There was something slightly weird about her face as she slept; she looked like a doll, or a statue, too perfect, the bloom of her cheeks too rosy, the curve of her full lips too much like a classical apogee. It was awake that I loved her face best, the mischievous curl of her lips when she laughed, the playful flicker of her eyes, those devilish dimples when she smiled. But as I studied her, I suddenly saw a small scar above her left eyebrow, just a tiny line of white above the tawny gold, and I don't know why, but that scar delighted me. Like a tiny flaw amidst all that beauty suddenly made her human and loveable again. Bending down, I kissed that scar and felt my heart thud in my chest.

As if feeling the weight of my lips, she shifted, and her eyes flickered, then opened. She blinked a few times, then tried to smile as she recognised the dim outline of my face in the orange-purple half-dark of a New York City night. "Please tell me this is not the normal time you wake up."

"Well, not normally, no. But on the rare occasions I've got a beautiful woman lying naked in my bed, I try to make an exception." Bending over, I kissed her softly. "Come here," I directed, and folded her into my arms. And as she nestled up against me, wrapping her arms around my neck, she noticed that I had grown stiff against her in the night.

"Oh," she said, and that adorably wicked light of mischief danced in her eyes as she reached for the brown paper bag again.

And she was right, of course. She had been an excellent teacher. Sex the second time was easier, more familiar, and I brought her off more quickly, until I started to feel proud of how I could wring ecstasy from her body. Feeling like I could actually do this, I threw myself into our pleasure with reckless abandon, losing myself in her completely, any residual nervousness just burning off with our orgasms. And then we both shifted in one another's arms and fell back into sleep.

 

The alarm was a fucking siren, exploding in my ear. Was it really 8 already? I'd only just closed my eyes. Merry shifted and cast me a sour look, reaching over my head to fiddle with the alarm, but succeeded only in hitting the snooze button. "I can't snooze, I've got to get up and go to work."

"Throw a sickie."

I puzzled over this for a moment, trying to drag memories of English slang from some back drawer of my brain. "I can't call in sick. Andre knows I had a date last night, and besides, I have important phone calls to make today."

"Important phone calls, schmone calls. Stay in bed and fuck me this afternoon."

"I would love nothing more than to stay in bed and fuck you repeatedly, but Windlass does not pay me to stay in bed and fuck beautiful women. Yet." Even I had to admit, the pull of bed was strong, and the pull of the smell of recent sex all over the both of us was even stronger. But she had closed her eyes and was drifting off to sleep again, so I gave up, turned the alarm off and shuffled off to the shower. Let her sleep for another 20 minutes; clearly angels did not need dayjobs.

Alone in the bathroom, I bent down and sniffed at myself. The enticing scent of Merry's musk was all over me, and I felt a faint shiver pass through my whole body, my cock twitching distractingly. _No. Behave_ , I told it. _Into the shower with you_. Standing under the hot water, I felt the shower revive me, throwing my head back to wash my hair. I emerged to rub myself vigourously with a towel before wiping the steam from my mirror. A new man stared back at me, blinking in the morning light. Well, no, not an entirely new man. I was, indeed, still short, and kinda skinny, and had too much unruly hair dripping in my face, but the awkwardness seemed gone. I stood up straight, my slight shoulders erect, then smirked at my reflection in the mirror, trying to see myself through Merry's gaze. Large, deep-set, hazel eyes, sparkling with some newfound confidence; broad cheekbones jutting out above my sideburns; my lips puffy and pink from kissing; angular jawline, and a heart-shaped chin with a slight dimple just in the centre. This face, that had stared back at me from the mirror for 24 years, was a face that a girl like Merry could desire. I wanted to laugh; but instead I stretched and brushed my teeth.

When I returned, showered but unshaved, I stuck my head back into the sleeping loft and roused her again. "You are so mean," she whimpered. "Why won't you stay with me, you beautiful boy."

"Sweetie, I can't." I paused as I poked her back to consciousness with the determined application of my tongue against her exposed nipple. Why did she have to even taste so good? She cuffed me gently on the top of the head, and rolled over away from me. "Will you come to the gig tonight, though?"

"Can't. Working."

"What time do you get off work? Can you meet me for supper, at least?"

"I'm working the dinner shift tonight. Right from mid-afternoon, through supper, until 11 o'clock at night."

"That's perfect. We won't be on until midnight, at least. Stop by, after work."

"I can't. I wear a... well, my clothes would not be appropriate."

"A uniform, huh." I smiled at the thought of her in uniform. "What do you do?"

"I'm a kind of... erm, waitress, a hostess, I guess you'd call it."

That, I'd never considered. A waitress. I was dating a waitress. Not just a girl who hadn't gone to college, but an actual waitress. My parents would completely freak out. They always assumed I'd marry one of those overeducated career girls with a string of degrees from NYU. I wondered if she wore one of those cute pink waitress uniforms with the aprons, or oh god, what if she was a barista at Starbucks. Or worse, worked at fast food? No, no girl who became a vegetarian because of Meat Is Murder would ever work at McDonalds. But she was falling asleep again. Christ, if she was going to spend her whole day on her feet, really, I should let her sleep.

And then a mad plan formed in my head. I didn't know why I trusted her, but I just did. "Look, I'm going to leave you my spare set of keys. Get some rest. And then tonight, after your shift is over, come back here and... finish that bottle of wine, chill out or whatever. Then change and come over and meet me at the Continental, or just stay here and be naked in my bed when I get back. Is that OK with you?"

She suddenly sat upright, both her eyes wide open. "You trust me with your _keys_?" 

I merely shrugged. "Call me an optimist, but I like to believe the best about people."

"You've got nearly ten grand's worth of guitars, amps, stereo equipment in this flat, and you're just going to leave me the keys?"

Despite five years of living in the East Village and the Lower East Side, I had still never quite learned to see my possessions in terms of cold hard cash like that. I was frequently quite cavalier with my spare keys - but then again, Doyle and Dieter had a distinct disinterest in fucking with my musical equipment. "I trust you," I told her. "You had your mouth wrapped around my genitals for twenty minutes, and you never even tried to bite."

She laughed, then slumped back against the pillow and smiled. "You're a complete sweetheart, you know that right?" I blushed slightly and lowered my eyes. "But OK. It's a deal. I'll be waiting for you here tonight when you get in from your gig."

Then I kissed her like a tired businessman, and left for work, leaving my spare keys on the table downstairs with a note, covered in scrawled kisses and the promise of sexual adventures to come.

 

\----------

 

My swagger said it all, as I swanned into work fifteen minutes late, my success beaming all over my face (and, possibly, a particularly livid lovebite beaming on my neck).

Andre just laughed and shook his head. "Well, I'm not even going to ask. Clearly Asheton got his pecker wet last night. Well done, you dog."

"Gentlemen," I said with what I hoped was a devilish grin. "I would ask you to refrain from such coarse language, since, as of this morning, I am now a man with a girlfriend."

"A girlfriend," whistled Sergei.

"Surely this will put a crimp in your plans for your rock star lifestyle," teased Andre.

"She doesn't mind. She's also a musician," I explained proudly. "She's also insanely beautiful."

"Well, you will meet my beautiful wife tonight at your gig. I am bringing her, my sister in law, and the drummer boyfriend."

I rolled my eyes, then remembered the drummers that I was supposed to be ringing on Doyle's behalf, and eased myself into my seat, getting at least two hours of expense reports signed off and reimbursed before I dared reach for the phone.

After work, I went home to change, and though my heart - and my cock - twitched at the thought that I might catch Merry still in my apartment, she was long gone. Nothing had changed, though I wasn't sure what I was expecting - Merry didn't seem the type to rearrange the furniture or scrub the bathtub. But when I went into my kitchen, and looked into the fridge, expecting the usual sparse collection of condiments and expired milk bottoms, I started to laugh. A half gallon of skim milk, several pots of yoghurt, cottage cheese, a whole pile of fresh fruit, and a selection of salad vegetables. Yes, I definitely had a girlfriend now.

I shaved the chin I'd forgotten that morning and trimmed my sideburns, then changed my clothes. When I was confident I looked OK, I packed my guitar case and my Fender Twin in the back of a cab, and headed up to the Continental to scope out the scene. Metropolis were one of four bands. I hated the way the that those St Marks Place venues piled on support acts in order to squeeze in as many punters as possible, but the place would never be cool enough to attract drinkers on its own merits. Idiots were always spilling in off the main strip, and it was near enough to the subway at Astor Place to pull in tourists, but they had a fair door policy, and getting a lot of our friends and fans down on a Friday night meant that we would get paid decently for a change.

But first, a word with the promoter and then the bartender. There were to be no drink tickets tonight, and especially not for Darin, no matter how he begged. I showed the two bartenders on duty the picture on the front of our demo CD, then pulled out a ten dollar bill, pushing it into their tip jar. "This one, with the black hair and the eagle tattoo on his hand? No drinks for him, under any circumstances. You'll get another tenner if he makes it onstage sober." It was a dirty business, but it had to be done.

There was the usual negotiation with the other bands over backline and running order. I had organised the show myself, had hand picked three other bands I either owed favours to, or wanted to curry favour with, but got to the venue to find that the manager had randomly added a fifth. The Rocket Pops, The Tea Set and Fab's band, whatever they were called that week, had all agreed to share a backline. Fab was providing the drumkit, the Rocket Pops had brought their bass cabinet, and Metropolis, of course, had brought our Fender Twins for the guitars. This mysterious fifth band, of course, refused to share, claiming they wanted to use their own amps and their own drum kit. That automatically meant they either had to go on first or last, because there was no way the soundperson was tearing down and setting up their mics twice, but the band made some noise about having a whole party of friends coming over from Jersey, and The Tea Set were just happy to be playing somewhere that wasn't their rehearsal space, so I just let the interlopers have the last spot. They got all excited about "headlining", but that just showed what newbies they were. Little did they realise the last spot was actually the worst, as if anyone went over their allotted time, or if the first band started late (which they always did, as who wanted to go on at 8pm to an empty bar?) it ate into their set, and they would be the ones getting cut off.

Metropolis had already bagged the coveted fourth spot; it was our right, as we had booked the gig. However, The Rocket Pops, who were supposed to go on second, hopped up on their own self importance and the arrogance of having some major label interest sniffing around, made a play for our spot. I had already agreed it with the Pops' manager, I told Phil repeatedly, refusing to back down, until eventually Fab said his band didn't actually care when they went on, they would happily go on second, and the Pops could have the third spot. 

No, that wasn't good enough, insisted Phil. He didn't want Fab's spot, he wanted Metropolis' spot. Phil was getting more and more aggressive, and it might have come to blows had their manager, Taylor, not arrived and placated everyone, and smoothed down all the ruffled feathers. Fab's band would go on second, the Pops would go on third, and Metropolis could have the golden hour.

It was absurd that it had come to this, I told her, considering it had all been arranged over the phone weeks earlier, but to my great surprise, she just agreed with me, and told me I was correct. I had to laugh; there was little better I liked more than being told I was right all along. Now that was a skilful manager, with good people skills. Maybe that was the reason they were getting such record label attention: their good manager, and not their derivative, sell-out punk-pop music after all, I thought to myself, slightly cattily.

Doyle finally appeared, guitar gigbag slung casually over one shoulder, a book of the poems of Richard Brautigan peeking out of the side pocket. He'd had his hair cut, and looked really good, his freshly shaven chin indicating that his girlfriend was back in town, so he was behaving. "Daniel!" he greeted, slapping me on the back. "So how was your date? How's Merry?"

My grin said everything anybody needed to know. "Great. Merry's... Merry's amazing. I'm totally in love." The moment I said it, I knew it was already true.

Staring thoughtfully into my face, Doyle examined me carefully, chewing on the end of the toothpick he habitually carried when he was trying to give up smoking for the sake of his pipes or his relationship. "I'm happy for you, bud. But is she in love with you?"

"I think she might be? She acts like she might be?"

"You banged her?" asked Doyle.

"I..." I rolled my eyes skyward, and blushed and grinned like a little boy, then nodded quickly, though the word 'banging' did not even begin to cover what Merry had done to me overnight. "Yes. Oh god yes."

"Dude! Is that a hickie?" He bent to look at my neck, but I quickly adjusted my shirt collar to cover it. "Nah, good luck to you. I hope you two are very happy." Turning around to the bartender, he gestured for two beers. "Here's to girls. Girls are the fucking best."

"Is this the one I'm not supposed to serve?" asked the bartender, eyeing Doyle warily.

"No, he's fine. It's the drummer who's on the wagon tonight. Black hair, eagle tattoo."

"That's a bit underhanded," Doyle laughed.

"So long as it works, who cares."

"Didn't know you had it in you, Dan. Banging girls, taking Darin's drinking problem in hand, who knows what you'll surprise us with next."

I just grinned and accepted the friendly ribbing, as I saw Dieter sloping in through the door, bass slung over his back. "OK, if the three of us are all here, I guess we can start soundchecking. Fab... Hey Fab, since we're using your kit, do you mind soundchecking with us?"

Up onstage, rapidly trying to manoeuvre his drumkit into the space vacated by the out-of-town band, Fab nodded, then pushed a fistful of hair out of his face. "Yeah, alright, but just for soundcheck. Gotta warn you, though, I don't hit anywhere near as hard as Darin."

Casting an exasperated look back at Doyle, I went up to the stage and started shifting our guitar amps into place. Of course, every time I asked Fab if he'd fill in, I always hoped that he'd fall head over heels with Metropolis and offer to stay on as our permanent drummer, but he never ever did.

"What's your line-up?" asked the soundman, hovering at the edge of the kit, distributing microphones to each drum. He was already eyeing the Fender Twins with suspicion.

"Just bass, drums, two guitars, vocals, that's all, Sir," I supplied, doing my best to be polite, even obsequious. It never hurt to be respectful to sound people. In any club in the East Village they were likely to be the most powerful person there - not to mention often the only person guaranteed to get paid. There was a Far Side cartoon stuck to the door of the Under-Pony studio, of a soundman turning up a giant button labelled "SUCK" while a rock band played, with their music getting progressively worse. That was the kind of power that sound people wielded. A good soundman could make you sound like rock stars even in a tiny room, but if you were rude to a soundman, it was the fastest shortcut to making sure you sounded like Bryan Adams playing at the bottom of a well.

"How many vocals?"

"Just the one," I said.

"Two," insisted Dieter, stepping up onto the stage as if he owned it, bass already slung across one shoulder like a weapon. Christ, Dieter didn't even sing, he just used the mic to regale the audience between the songs, specifically because he knew that too much stage banter irritated Doyle. "Am I using the Rocket Pops' bass cabinet or should I go direct?"

"All bass is going direct," the Soundman said, throwing a DI box onto the floor in front of us.

"Hey, I told you, we're using the bass cab," Phil interrupted from the floor. "We never have the bass high enough in the monitors..."

"We're fine with a direct box," I interrupted, stepping between them and smiling politely. "Sorry, I didn't catch your name? I'm Daniel, lead guitar..."

The Soundman didn't even answer me, he just snorted and loped back to the soundbooth. "Drummer! Let's have the kick," echoed out a disembodied soundman voice from the monitor wedges. Fab just shrugged and grinned, then slid behind the kit. One by one, they went through the drums, kick, snare, rock tom, floor tom, hi-hat, and on and on, each one popping to life as the PA boomed an amplified version through the club. I set up my pedalboard and plugged everything in, checking the connections and tuning my guitar. "Bass!" boomed the disembodied soundman and Dieter started to play, octave-hopping his way through some disco shit, his sound suddenly doubled, in the monitors and again out in the club.

Doyle appeared beside me, and plugged in his single distortion pedal, crouching down to adjust the volume so that guitar blasted out across the stage. "Knock it off," I warned, shooting him a warning glance.

"Just bass, please," snapped the disembodied soundman. Dieter stepped forward and played even louder. "Any effects on the bass?" Dieter obligingly stepped on his distortion pedal and was rewarded with a beautiful, snarling noise like a coiled snake. God, my band sounded good. "Lead guitar?" barked the soundman.

Right. My turn. Switching the amp over from standby, I strummed my guitar and was rewarded with the spine-tingling tone of a semi-hollow-body guitar dripping with fuzzy reverb. My amp always sounded better onstage, and then sounded even better again as the soundman brought it up over the PA, and I heard my own playing echoing about the room.

"Got any effects?" boomed my monitor.

"Do I have any effects," I chuckled, then started to cycle through them. Overdrive, a gentle warming fuzz that gritted up the sound nicely and made the edges of my power chords fizz with excitement. Chorus, a chiming, ringing tone that recalled Curse records from the 80s. Delay, oh yes, a shimmering echo effect that instantly turned us into a Dead Letters album. And finally, Distortion, the Big Muff boosting the volume and twisting my guitar tone into a plume of noise like a fountain of electricity. Oh god, I loved my guitar pedals. Some day, when we got signed and we were all rich, I planned on having about a dozen of the things all wired together.

"You're gonna have to turn that down, it's much louder than your clean tone," the disembodied soundman commanded, and I dropped to my knees, slightly resentfully, to tone it down a bit. But the soundman had already moved on. "OK, rhythm guitar," he demanded, and it was Doyle's turn, first guitar, and then vocals.

"Don't put too much of my voice in the monitors," Doyle asked, provoking a belly-laugh from the soundguy.

"What, you don't want no vocals? Everybody's always complaining they can't hear themselves in the monitors."

"I sing better when I can't hear myself," Doyle mumbled apologetically, scratching his head so that his hair stood up in odd angles at the back. He always looked slightly like an overgrown child onstage.

"No you don't," scoffed Dieter. "You just think you do."

"Can I have some of Doyle's vocals in my monitor, please?" I asked nicely. "I need to know when the verses begin and end."

"Just count like everyone else," said Dieter, who never ever bothered counting, and just followed whatever I played.

"Are you ready to do a song yet?" the soundman asked, irritation already creeping into his voice.

I turned around to face Fab, still tugging at his hi-hat stand to get the cymbal to sit right. "Do you know Pick-Up Artist?"

"Yeah, remind me which one that is?" Fab tugged at his mop of hair.

"Kind of a schaffel-y one?" I said. Fab just looked blank. "You know, like Ballroom Blitz by The Sweet?" Fab just shrugged and shook his head.

"The one that sounds like The Smiths," Doyle suggested.

"Oh yeah, that one," Fab remembered, clicked his drumsticks a few times and broke into a pretty fair approximation of P.U.A. And we were off, as I counted down 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 bars of drums, and then came in with the slicing guitar, ringing with fuzz like an alarm. Dieter came up behind me with his urgent, insistent bassline, pushing the whole song forward in a propulsive rush, and then finally Doyle broke into song, bellowing his sexual frustration over the top in a rich baritone. So this was how good we could sound with a decent drummer! Christ, I loved my band. Why couldn't we sound like this all the time?

Abruptly, the monitors cut out and the disembodied soundman cut in. "Right, that's it, guys. Come on, we got three more bands to soundcheck. Get off the stage." And that was it; that was our whole soundcheck.

As quickly as I could, I coiled up my cables and put my guitar and pedalboard back in their cases and then rush, rush, rushed to stash everything away backstage so that the Rocket Pops could start their soundcheck. The whole process was repeated three more times, with increasing speed, and then it was time to open the doors.

The doors opened and the crowd started to fill up. I did my best to mingle with the punters, schmoozing fellow musicians and sweet-talking fans I recognised from other shows. It made such a difference, I knew, though Dieter always acted like he was too jaded for that sort of thing, unless it was an attractive young girl. So many of the NYC scenester bands were so arrogant, they held themselves aloof from the crowd - either that or professed some weird slavish allegiance to 'the kids' while chasing potential marks down Second Avenue with gig flyers. But I had learned from experience, that saying hello to the familiar faces, and thanking them for coming to gigs, especially a shitty fourth on the band bonanza at the Continental, that made casual fans twice as likely to actually turn up to the next show than just pressing a flyer into their sweaty palms.

It was a weird night, I could tell already. There were nights when gigs just felt _right_ , when the stars aligned, and everything fell into place, like that night at the Lacuna with the Down Time. And then there were nights when the whole city felt tense, on edge, and the tension translated itself through the crowds to the bands and onto the stage. And speaking of flyers, here was some weirdo who had come up to the door and was arguing with the clipboard chick, repeatedly pointing at a flyer. There was always some fuckwit who tried to play on scene connections to get into gigs for free, and would not take no for an answer. And I felt a leaden weight of dread in the pit of my stomach when I saw it was a Metropolis flyer. Even from twenty paces off, I could spot Metropolis flyers. It was Dieter and his ineffable sense of style, putting together cut-up bits of 1920s German art, silent film posters and military kitsch, all in that distinctive black and red colour scheme. But was too late. The clip-board girl had just pointed me out, and the weirdo was headed over, still clutching the flyer, so I put on my best smile and tried to steel myself for the accusatory spiel of _how come I'm not on the guest list_ from this total stranger.

"You're in Metropolis?" the wild-eyed stranger accosted me, spilling hair from a greying ponytail.

"Sure. I'm Daniel, I play guitar."

"You must tell me - who does your posters?" Producing a voluminous black canvas bag that looked a bit like an oversized record bag, he started to pull more posters and flyers from it, dating back months, maybe even a year.

"Dieter. Our bassist." I stared at the flyers. I didn't really think about them, they were Dieter's _thing_. But arranged all together like that, they did look quite spectacular.

"I _must_ speak with him," insisted the odd man. I pondered this for a moment, considering whether to turn to the bouncer for help, feeling an oddly protective impulse towards my band, even the insufferable Dieter. "Look, I own a gallery down on Christopher Street. The Painted Word. Whoever does these flyers, I want to give him a show. I must have larger versions of these." He produced a business card and thrust it into my hand.

OK, well, that looked legit. I shrugged, and gestured with my head for the strange, intense little man to follow me down the hallway to the backstage, where Dieter was holding court, lording it over the other bands and a circle of adoring females. "Dieter...?" In response to my bassist's irritated glare at being interrupted, I handed over the business card. "There's some guy here from a gallery... something about your flyers?"

Dieter unfolded himself, and stood up, straightening up to his full height, his face a reptilian smile of pleasure as he introduced himself to the gallery owner, who responded by pulling even more flyers from the portfolio-bag. There was something so surreal, and yet perfectly normal about the whole scene that I just wanted to laugh, giddy as I already was from sleep deprivation. Leaving them to discuss their _utility of negative space_ and _semiotics of silent film signifiers_ to their hearts' content, I returned to the main room to check out the crowd.

Darin finally arrived. My plot appeared to be working, as I could see him get refused up at the bar, and I had already persuaded the other bands to hide their liquor in their gig bags. That meant we might have a hope in hell of sounding at least passable for a change. But then Erland appeared. What the fuck was he doing at the Continental? His band wasn't playing, and surely he should have been doing his regular shift at the Lacuna Lounge? Something was up. He and Darin conversed for a few minutes, then they both made for the door and asked the bouncer for readmission stamps. Oh no they didn't.

I cut between them and the door. "Hi, Erland, how nice to see you here. Darin, where are you going? We have a gig."

"Chill. We're just going to Starbucks for a latte and a chat." There was nothing I could say to that, even as I watched the pair of them go straight past the door of Starbucks and head towards Broadway.

"Fuck," I swore, wondering if I should run after them, but suddenly I found myself swept up in a giant Slavic bear-hug.

"Daniel! This is my wife, Isabelle." It was Sergei, introducing me to a tiny, slender, impossibly beautiful Polish girl with long white hair and a pale doll's face, standing next to an even tinier, blonder, more beautiful miniature version of herself. "And her sister, Jessica. And sister-boyfriend, Ricardo."

I was confused at first, because Ricardo was not a metalhead at all, in fact, was not even Polish. He was a broad, solid looking man with thick horn-rimmed glasses, slicked back greaser hair underneath a trilby, and a retro 1950s style polo shirt with a vaguely Hawaiian motif in a stripe down one side. "The drummer," I remembered. "Good to meet you, man."

"Yeah, I've just moved up from Dallas to be with Jess. Still haven't got my head around the NYC scene yet. So many clubs... I've never even been in here before, though I've walked by a couple of times. I liked the dinosaurs on the roof." His southern accent was disarming, and I found myself liking the man, despite the heavy metal thing.

"How's the scene down there?" I asked vaguely, falling back on default out-of-town musician chat.

"It's alright... if you like both kinds of music... country _and_ western."

"I take it you don't."

"Well, I like a bit of rockabilly, Sun Records, that kind of thing..."

"I told you he was a rrrocker, he rocks hard," laughed Sergei, then offered to buy us all a round of drinks.

I looked at the drummer more carefully. Rockabilly / Rocker. It was the kind of mistake a non-native English speaker could easily make. "What kind of music do you really like, then?"

"You know, kinda dark stuff. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tindersticks, maybe even a bit of The Curse and Dead Letters?"

My ears shot up. "You know, I might want to get your phone number later?" I proffered the demo CD I always kept in the pocket of my suit jacket before gigs.

"Yeah, Sergei told me you guys were looking for a drummer. I thought I'd come down and check you out, see what you were about."

"Look, here, take our CD, see what you think," I offered. Ricardo smiled when he saw the cover, and thumped his finger against the photo. "Yeah, I know. We wear suits. It's kind of our look..." I found myself repeating, yet again, almost apologetically.

"It's a really good look. I like it. And not a fucking cowboy hat in sight. Heck, I might even get my glittery Gretsch kit shipped up if I like your sound. That'd suit your image..."

But at that moment, I looked over and saw Erland and Darin stumbling back through the door. No... he couldn't possibly have got that drunk in that little time? But no, he wasn't limping, he was just trying to conceal something underneath his coat. "Excuse me a moment..." I hedged, and followed them. As soon as they turned the corner, I saw Darin extract a pint bottle of vodka from underneath his coat. "Oh, for fucks sake..." Turning on my heel, I went and found a bouncer.

Of course there was a scene. The bouncer wanted to just throw Darin out, no questions asked. I fetched the promoter and begged him to just toss out the vodka, but let Darin play the gig if he stayed backstage. But Darin was having none of it.

"Fuck this petty shit," he spat. "I'm done with you treating me like a fucking child."

"Well, if you insist on acting like a fucking child!"

"John Bonham and Keith Moon used to go on stage much more wasted than I ever have..."

"You, my friend, are hardly John Bonham."

"I make this band; I am the best drummer you're even going to find in this scene."

"Maybe when you're sober, yes, but when you're drunk, you fuck up. You cost us things, Darin, and I'm sick of you costing us shit." Oh fuck it, I was angry, my face flushing, so I just spat it out, even in Dieter and Doyle's hearing. "You know what Barry Michaels told me at our last gig? You are holding us back. Lose the fucking drummer, and he might be interested. _We_ are carrying you."

"Fuck it," snorted Darin, though he was clearly taken aback. "I don't even want to play your shitty no-hope gig in this shitty no-hope venue. That was what Erland came to told me. He's quit his job because Motion Sickness have been offered the support slot on the next Pearl Jam tour. We leave in two weeks. So fuck Metropolis, and fuck your shitty attitude."

I stepped back, fuming. Half of me just wanted to shake Erland's hand and say good fucking luck to him, if he thought taking an alcoholic waster like Darin on a world tour was a reasonable fucking idea. Pearl Jam? What a fucking joke. But the other half of me realised that no matter how pissed off at Darin I was at that moment, without Darin, there was no gig that night.

"You are getting on that stage whether you like it or not, and do you know why?" I hissed. "Because your whole fucking kit, bar snare drum and cymbals, is still in the hall of my apartment, and you are fucked if you are getting it back without playing this shitty little no-hope gig. So good luck going on tour with Pearl Jam without your kit."

"You can buy another kit," spat Erland, furious at me, even though he'd clearly won, and he had poached our drummer from under my nose.

But Darin looked back and forth between us sullenly. "I can't afford another kit. I'll play the fucking gig." And for the first time in history, Dieter was not the last person to appear onstage. Lights, camera, fucking action indeed.

It was, I reflected later, perhaps the worst gig of our life. Not the music - for with Darin reasonably sober, we played well, better than we had at the Lacuna Lounge, for Barry Michaels. But the tension onstage was fucking unbearable, and I was too angry to even dance. Every single song, Darin sped up, starting us off fast, as if he was in a hurry to get offstage and get it over, and trainwrecking us badly, even as Dieter and I fought, guitar and bass, to pull him back. 

Between the fourth and fifth songs, I finally turned and walked to the back of the stage to glare at him, hissing "Come on, man, stick to the fucking tempo."

"What the fuck?" snapped Darin. "It's not my fault! I can't hear a fucking thing in the monitor. Hey, Mr fucking Sound Guy, yeah you!" Darin grabbed the mic that the soundman had so carefully positioned over the snare drum. "Are you going to do your fucking job and give me some fucking guitar in my monitor, or what?"

I cringed. There went any hope we had of ever sounding any good. "If you're not happy with the sound, you could have turned up to the fucking soundcheck," I snapped at Darin, but when I got back to the front of the stage, the vocals had disappeared completely out of my monitor. That was it. Our drummer had insulted the soundman. We were going to suck, and suck hard.

So yes, it was a disaster. I knew it, even though other people slapped me on the back, and told me how fresh and exciting the band sounded, and suggested that maybe speeding up the songs was a really good idea.

"Yeah, whatever," I said, though I was searching the crowd for Sergei and Ricardo. The girls, however, were easy to spot, two tiny blonde angels standing on a table near the front. "I am so, so sorry. Please, listen to the CD, it's much more representative," I told Ricardo, even as he pumped my hand.

"Well, I can certainly see why you're getting rid of that drummer. He is really the _wrong_ drummer for you."

"We were fucking terrible, I know," I apologised, and Ricardo nodded. 

"You guys were actually OK for the first three or four songs, but man... Never give your sound guy shit from the stage. Never." I could tell from the expression on the guy's face that we had blown it. He was never going to be interested now. Never mind, I had an angry drummer to get rid of, and a kit to disgorge from my apartment, down four flights of rickety stairs.

Back at the apartment, I knocked on the door to warn Merry, then stuck my head into the main room. "Merry?" A dishevelled blonde head appeared above the top of the bed, and my heart leapt as I realised she was, indeed, waiting in my bed, naked. But unfortunately, I had other business to attend to first. "Sweetie, you better put some clothes on, I've got company. So sorry..." Her face fell, and I was surprised but heartened to see how disappointed she looked, but instead of going to her, I stalked back out to the passage, where Darin was trying to sift through his belongings.

"The bongos are not yours, those are Dieter's, don't even fucking think of taking them," I warned, retrieving them from the pile.

"Yeah, well, this keyboard is mine," Darin retaliated, and I winced. We never used it live, but we'd come to rely on it when recording demos.

"Can I help?" asked Merry, reappearing, wrapped in my raincoat, and I didn't even want to think about what she was or wasn't wearing underneath, I just wanted Darin out of my apartment.

"Yeah, can you call a cab, please."

Between the three of us, we finally managed to get all the gear downstairs, then piled into the back of a gypsy cab, and then Darin drove off, without even a backwards glance, let alone a kind word, and I just stared after him, dejected. Two years, we'd been playing with Darin, and not even a word of goodbye. But that was the music business, wasn't it?

"Are you alright?" I felt the slight pressure as Merry snaked her arm around my shoulders, and pressed her head reassuringly against the side of my own.

"Darin has just quit," I announced. Well, at least it spared me the awkwardness of having to sack him, though really, it was the indignity of it that burned.

"You hated Darin anyway. You were going to sack him, remember?" Merry pointed out, as we climbed the stairs together.

"Without a drummer, we don't have a band."

"Use our drummer, for now. Gabe adores Doyle, I'm sure he'd happily fill in for you until you found someone," Merry suggested, and I felt my stomach wobble at how I'd doubted her before.

"It's not a long term solution," I pointed out.

"You're right," she told me. "But in the short term... that means there's no way you're going to be able to have rehearsal this weekend, doesn't it?"

"That's true. I better cancel next week's bookings."

"Not now, though," Merry told me, nuzzling my neck as I unlocked the door and let us both back into my flat. As I closed the door behind me, she reached for the buttons of my raincoat and slowly started to unfasten them, just enough for me to realise that she was still nude underneath. "You can do it on Monday. For this weekend, you are going to turn off your phone, and I am going to turn off my pager, and you and I are not going to get out of bed again, until you and I are really _good_ at sex together."


	7. Why Her And Not Me?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> OK, so Metropolis have crashed and burned after losing their drummer at the Continental gig. But who needs a band when you're spending a weekend in bed, with your record collection, with a beautiful girlfriend who loves music maybe even more than you do?
> 
> But what happens to the newfound blissful idyll of Daniel and Merry, when Merry's band gets discovered, but Daniel's doesn't?

I didn't realise how much I'd _needed_ that weekend, until I was back on the subway on Monday morning, with a giant grin plastered all over my face. Merry was amazing. Two whole days, barely getting out of bed. We'd had sex, the warm, intimate, spine-tingling kind of sex that got better and better every time we did it, then we'd slept, and she'd filled me with food, fresh fruit and vegetables, then we did it all over again in a repeating cycle.

"Why do you keep filling me with fruit and cottage cheese?" I teased as she fed me another super-healthy breakfast. "Is this your way of telling me I need to go on a diet?"

"No," she'd laughed, "It's my way of telling you if you get more Vitamins C and D then your skin won't break out quite so badly in the midwinter."

"Do you think I need looking after, or something?" I shot her a vaguely hopeful look, as I kind of wanted someone to look after me, but she just laughed and threw a grape at me.

"Honey, I can't even look after a cat. You're on your own. But you do need to eat more fruit."

So we spent hours lying in bed as the snow came down outside, just staring into each others' eyes and mooning over one another, naked skins touching every inch we could find to press together. We talked, about music mostly, climbing down out of the bed so we could play each other records. It amazed me, that here was a girl who never told me to shut up because I talked about music too much, in fact, she spurred me on to talk about bands more and more, and even urged me to play records for her. A girl who was able to rhapsodise about her own favourite music, and turn me on to artists that _I_ had never even heard of. (I made a mental note to check out the obscure artists like Disco Inferno and A.R.Kane that she kept namedropping.) I was pleased to find that although our tastes didn't entirely overlap (I was far more partial to rock and guitar music than she was, though she had a marked preference for dance music and weird electronic stuff) she shared the same single-minded passion of having to follow every musical strand down through a genre or a label or a scene, to its ultimate conclusion. We might not always like exactly the same music, but we had the same obsessive need to search and investigate and view unobtainable records merely as quests to be risen to. We made plans to go record shopping and crate digging together the next weekend, then declared we would make each other mixtapes.

And though we had promised each other not to talk about our own bands all weekend, and mostly stuck to it, it felt good to have the space to discover other things about each other.  It wasn't enough to explore every inch of her body; I wanted to know every single thing about her, wanted to wind my way around the back corners of her brain, map out her tastes and her personality, surprised at just how adorable every single new fact about her turned out to be.

"So when's your birthday?" she asked, tracing tiny circles in the palm of my hand with the tip of her finger.

"Oh, not for months yet. Not until September." Raising myself on one arm, I looked down at her, studying her thick blonde eyelashes.

"What day?" 

"The 23rd."

"Morning or evening?" Her voice was suddenly urgent.

"The evening. Late, I think. Do you want me to ring my Mum and find out for you?"

"Oh phew, you're a Libra, that's OK, then."

I laughed aloud. "What, are you into astrology? What sign are you, then?"

"Leo. The 10th of August. That's why we're so sexually compatible. Leos and Libras are fine. Leos and Virgos are bad news."

"Well, I'm glad to hear that," I told her, kissing the top of her head. Secretly, I thought astrology was complete nonsense, but somehow it just amused me that she thought it was important. Anything that added to our apparent compatibility, I was happy to go along with.

"What's your favourite colour?" she persisted, turning over onto her side and nuzzling her face against my bare chest.

"Black," I told her.

"Black isn't a colour, it's the absence of colour. You should know this. I thought you went to NYU. You're supposed to learn that kind of thing at art school," she teased, then gently bit my nipple.

"I majored in Philosophy." I flicked her hair off my arm, where it was tickling me. "But alright, then, if I can't have black... then red. Cherry red, like my Epiphone. What's yours?"

"Green. Deep green."

"Like your eyes," I suggested, with a little swoony sigh, bending down to press my lips against her delicate, blue-veined eyelids.

"No, darker, like emerald green. So if you ever want to buy me jewellery, buy me emeralds." She smirked, then winked to show she was not entirely serious.

"So I'm supposed to buy you jewellery, am I?" I teased. "Shower you with diamonds and pearls? I'm afraid you might have to make do with cubic zirconia, on a musician's budget."

"Well, when you're a rock star, you can buy me sports cars and private islands, but for now, I suppose ice cream and records will have to do."

"OK, if I'm buying you records, who's your favourite band, ever?" I countered, running my fingertip down her nose. "Oh wait, you said Slur, didn't you?"

"Actually, no. Graham Cooper is my biggest crush and my favourite guitarist - well, second favourite after you now, naturally," she corrected diplomatically, and I grinned and blushed appreciatively. "But Stereolab are my favourite band." She wriggled around in my embrace, and I dropped back down to the mattress, our noses almost touching. "What about you? Dead Letters, right?"

"Still Dead Letters," I agreed. "I'm nothing if not loyal."

"Loyal is good," she whispered and kissed the tip of my nose, wrapping her arms around my waist, then letting her fingers wander down across my ass. "I mean, I've probably had the same favourite novel since high school."

"And what is your favourite novel?" I whispered into her hair as she nibbled the side of my neck softly.

"Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons. Go on, laugh, I know it's a silly book, but it makes me so happy every time I read it."

"I saw something nasty in the woodshed," I announced in a fake old lady voice, just to show that knew it, and Merry giggled.

"Sure you did, honey, but did it see you?" Both of us burst out laughing. "What about you?"

I thought about it carefully, wanting to impress her. "Crime and Punishment," I finally supplied.

"Good lord, that's heavy going," observed Merry, frowning slightly and ruffling my hair, arranging my curls about my forehead. No matter how much time I spent trying to brush and blow-dry my hair straight, she seemed to take great delight in pulling it back into little ringlets again. Grabbing her hands by the wrists, I seized them to prevent further mischief, before kissing them gently and then sucking her fingertips into my mouth. "I'm almost afraid to ask your favourite film for fear you'll make me watch some impenetrable Russian thing like... Tarkovsky or something."

"No such luck. My favourite director is Godard, though I go back and forth between Breathless and Jules et Jim... what about your favourite film?"

"Barbarella; can't you tell from the boots?"

"Roger Vadim, I approve," I whistled, and kissed her appreciatively. And so on and so forth went the rest of the afternoon, as we established one after another, our compatibility in film and television and books and poetry and art. I had never met anyone so endlessly fascinating, and yet so endlessly fascinated by the completely mundane details of my own life.

Finally, on Sunday night, Merry relented on the healthy food kick, and let me order a large four-cheese pizza and break open a bottle of red wine. We lay curled up together on the sofa, not really watching a video of Blow Up, as both of us had seen it half a dozen times before. Really, I was just happy to lie with her in my arms, playing with her hair, tracing that adored thin line of the scar above her eyebrow, wondering if the angle of her nose reminded me more of Julie Christie or a young Marianne Faithfull. We both laughed at the scene in the mod nightclub, as Jeff Beck started to smash up his guitar, then both of us turned to the other, and simultaneously starting to say something, the words crashing into one another so neither of us could hear what the other said. "What?"

"No, what were you going to say?"

"No, no, you go first."

She smiled and repeated herself. "You know that it's only the Yardbirds because..."

"Yes, because they couldn't get The Who." I finished the sentence for her, squeezing her affectionately, because that was exactly what I had urgently wanted to tell her.

And then both of us burst out laughing, and both of us countered something like "Of course _you_ would know that."

As she shifted and lay her head against my chest, smiling up at me contentedly, I felt my heart fill up with emotion. This was it, wasn't it? This was that feeling that all of those pop songs were about, this kind of buzzy happiness in my chest, wishing I could just freeze time and carry this moment with me forever, looking down at this girl in my arms, thinking how amazing she was, how she was everything I'd always wanted, and feeling completely astonished and proud to see her looking so blissfully back at me.

I smiled down at her, and it just slipped out. "God, I love you."

She pulled a sour face, not the reaction I'd been hoping for, to be honest. "You've known me a week and a half."

"It's enough. My parents knew they loved each other the first night they met; they've been together for 30 years."

She pulled a weird expression, half pity and half affectionate toleration. "I hate that word, though."

"What word?" God? I threw it around as casually as the rest of my mates; I hadn't considered the idea that she might be seriously religious. Oh god, but it was obvious, from the icons she'd fawned over at the Met... shit! I'd just done it again, without thinking.

"Luff." She even pronounced it with a sneer.

"What's wrong with love?" Christ, had I just blown it? I panicked slightly, trying to claw my way back.

"It's not the concept, it's just the word. It means so many things to so many people, it's meaningless. You love gorgonzola cheese, you love your parents, you love Echo and the Bunnymen and you love Doyle, like a brother. How am I supposed to fit in all that?"

"Do you not love me?" For a moment, my heart fluttered, as the world around us seemed to dip and melt.

"Danny, I adore you." Relief flooded my chest at this admission. "It actually scares me, how happy you make me, and how much I want to be with you, just be around you, and this feeling, that I would do anything to make you as happy as I feel around you. Like, I could very easily do stupid things for you."

"I hope you trust me not to ask you to do stupid things." My face grew solemn as I saw the seriousness in her eyes.

"But that's not the point. I _would_. And that kind of emotion, it's dangerous. I'm frightened of inspiring it in people. Whenever people tell me that they love me, it means they turn around and do horrible things, and use this word to justify it."

"I would never do that. That's just not what I'm like. I hope you would have recognised that... I mean, I trust you. Haven't I shown that?" I thought back three days, to the thing with my keys. I had no idea why I'd done that. It was just a gut feeling, that anyone as direct as Merry had to be guileless.

"Yeah... I guess you have. And that is why I'm with you. I don't have a clue if I can trust you, but you certainly seem to trust me. Maybe you shouldn't, I don't know. You barely know me. Or maybe I should take a chance and trust you back, give into these feelings." Her eyes were full of confusion I didn't understand, like she seemed genuinely torn. But abruptly she sat up, her face in complete earnestness. "Listen, can we... can we have another word? It's a stupid thing to ask, but..."

"What kind of word?"

"A special word, meaningless to anyone else, but special just to us. A word for these feelings, if I do give in to them. This fierce tight feeling in my chest, that I want to trust you, that I'd do anything for you; the fluttery, tingly, sexual feeling when I see you, like I just look at your face or your body, or even just _smell_ you, and I get wet I want you so much; the comforting feeling that I hear your voice, and I instantly just feel happy, like, Danny's here, everything's going to be OK now."

I looked down at her, surprised by the tenderness in her voice. It shocked me, how easily she articulated exactly the feelings that I had been growing towards her. And the I felt a surge of pride and awe that she felt the same way about me, that I felt about her. I felt kind of dizzy with happiness. Then I smiled, and cast my eyes about, trying to think of some dumb meaningless syllable. My eyes caught on the bead curtain that divided the main room from the corridor, the light shining through from the passage beyond, where I'd forgotten to turn off the halogen spotlights, and I thought: yes, I feel just like that. Like a door has opened up in my life, and I can see her light, shining through. "Dawr," I said, my accent glossing the final R.

"Daw?" she repeated, unable to quite articulate the rhotic consonant in her clipped English accent.

"Yes, Daw," I agreed, wanting to cuddle the cuteness of that accent. "D-A-W. I daw you, Merry."

"I daw you, Danny," she said carefully, as if trying it out on her tongue. "Haha, yes, I like it. It sounds like adore, but it also sounds a bit like a swear. Perfect." Then she turned back to face me and fixed me with those glittering, mischievous eyes. "I daw you."

And it became our word. I said it when I kissed her to go to sleep, after a bout of sleepy Sunday evening lovemaking. I said it when I woke her half an hour early for one last fuck before the work week began. I said it when I squeezed her hand on our short walk up Ludlow Street, trying to make those few hundred yards last longer. I said it when I kissed her goodbye, leaving her at the top of the stairs to the subway station, as people streamed around us. I said it when I phoned her with plans to meet again for dinner and maybe a quick fuck in the week because I couldn't wait to see her until our next planned date at the weekend. And it did make me feel special, that this emotion that I felt for Merry, it was like nothing else I'd ever experienced - and it was certainly not like the emotions that I felt for gorgonzola cheese, Echo and the Bunnymen, or even my parents. I dawed Merry.

 

\----------

 

I rolled into work, floating on air, but was brought swiftly down to earth by the irate ringing of my phone with Doyle on the other end, wondering why on earth I hadn't returned any of his increasingly desperate messages. Yes, the advert was going live that week. No, I had not talked to Sergei's sister-in-law's boyfriend. And as I cast my eyes across the office, I realised that Sergei was actually on holiday that week - that was why he'd had the time and energy to come out to the club on Friday. And although yes, we probably should cancel all gigs for the next month or so, I did not know whether we should yet cancel the big one, the support slot at the Mercury Lounge that we had been angling for, for months. A lot could happen in a month, and who knew what would turn up. Holding the phone away from me slightly as Doyle ranted, I lost interest in the angry insect buzz in my ear, gazing off into space and just thinking... Merry daws me. I am the luckiest man in the world.

On Wednesday, I took Merry for dinner in a cosy little bistro I knew in the West Village, followed by coffee and pastries in an all-night Italian coffeehouse off Bleecker Street, then rounded the evening off with enthusiastic sex back at my apartment. Merry was in a good mood. Something was happening with her band, though she didn't want to jinx it yet by telling me. Ely was onto something, something really big, she thought. He had made an important contact in the music industry, and though I wheedled and whined and persisted in trying to get her to tell me, because I knew everyone - or at least had their numbers in my special work binder - and I could tell her whether the guy was bluffing or for real.

But even sulking didn't work, once I started pretending to mean things like "If you get signed before we find a drummer, you'll just have to dump me for a real rock star, won't you?"

"As if," she laughed, then fixed me with a serious expression. "Call Gabe if you need a drummer. I mentioned it to him, and he said he'd be totally up for doing it occasionally, so long as it doesn't interfere with The Down Time."

"Maybe," I said thoughtfully, sipping my coffee. After all, that would save the Mercury Lounge gig, and take some of the pressure off the horrendous Village Voice auditions I knew were coming up.

The drummer auditions, which started that Thursday evening, were predictably awful. An ageing metalhead, followed by a guy who wore sunglasses even inside the lightless rehearsal studio, at night, and had burst back into the studio because he'd forgotten his stick case, only to find us sheepishly still laughing at him. An overly showy jazz drummer who hadn't bothered mentioning his fee scale on the phone to Doyle. Then a stolid, respectable four on the floor kinda guy who might have been alright musically, were it not for the fact that he was over 100 pounds overweight, and his paunch hung over the snare drum alarmingly. Doyle tried to make a case for the guy, saying we could just dress him in a suit and no one would know, but Dieter put his foot down, absolutely not. Dieter had an absolute horror of obesity that made me wonder if he'd been a fat kid himself in grade school. The last kid, Dylan, was the best. He had the chops, and he looked OK - and, as Doyle pointed out, it would maintain our all-D policy. But then he revealed that he was only 17 and though he was fine with sneaking out on school nights to play gigs, he did not actually have an ID to get into any of the bars that we played.

It was hopeless, we decided as we adjourned to our customary table at the Irish bar on 30th St. So we stared into our beers and considered our options one more time, before I gave up and went off to phone Merry's pager to see if she wanted to crash at my place after work on Friday night.

"Well, at least loverboy here is getting laid," Dieter sniffed into his Guinness, when I returned.

"Lay off," warned Doyle. "Dan deserves a little happiness after all the shit he's shovelled for this band the past few months."

"Alright for you two, but when we're not playing shows, I'm not meeting women," Dieter complained, and I was tempted to burst out laughing.

"Well, why don't _you_ find us a drummer, then, Dieter?"

"I already suggested Gabriel. You wouldn't even hear of it," Dieter sniffed.

I smiled smugly and pulled the ace out of my sleeve. "Actually, I spoke to Merry. Gabe said he'd do the Mercury Lounge gig, no problem, but we can't come to rely on him, as he's always going to honour his commitments to The Down Time first."

Doyle rolled his eyes and made a face, then settled for just punching me in the arm, rather too hard to be entirely friendly. "Maybe we can start training Dylan up in the meantime. He'll turn 18 this summer, and then he'll be fine to play bigger venues, so long as he doesn't drink."

And so we went from having no drummer, to having two drummers at once, and having to schedule two different sets of rehearsals for the next month.

Merry loved the idea, as we combed through record shops together on St Mark's Place, the next weekend. "You could have them both onstage at once, you'd be like Hawkwind."

"Hawkwind," I moaned as I flipped through the second hand record stacks. "I really do despair of your musical taste sometimes."

"Hawkwind are brilliant, even you'd like some of their 70s Bob Calvert era stuff."

"Generally, I prefer it better when I try to pretend that the entire 70s never took place, thank you."

"The Clash and Joy Division both released their canonical albums in the 70s, you seem to like both of them just fine," she teased.

"My favourite Clash album is Combat Rock, and that came out in 1982."

"Really? You like that one best? I thought no one else in the world liked that one the best." She beamed at me for a moment, then went back to riffling through second hand CDs.

I moved over towards her, and draped my arm casually around her waist, enjoying the jealous glances of the other men in the shop. All of them had been giving Merry the eye since she walked in. Yes, eat your heart out. I was the one with the gorgeous girlfriend who worked her way through cutout bins even more efficiently than I did.

Abruptly, she let out a little swoony gasp. "Oh my god." I looked over to see she had reached the S section, and encountered a clutch of Slur singles. "I've been looking for these for so long."

"They're all songs from the second album. I refuse to believe that you wouldn't have _The Litter of Modernity_ ," I pointed out. "It is their best album, really."

"Of course I have the album," she snorted. "But the B-sides of the _Modernity_ period are amazing. You know there was a whole lost album between _Pleasure_ and _Modernity_? All the tracks turned up as B-sides. A friend made me a tape, trying to reconstruct the track-listing, but I've played it so much it's starting to warp... Oh, they're expensive, especially for second hand, but I've got to get them."

"I probably shouldn't tell you this, then, but there was a picture disc of _Modernity_ -era interviews, over in the vinyl section..."

"Really?" Her eyes lit up, opened as wide as saucers. Obediently, I went back over, dug through until I found it, then brought it back over to her. She let out a little squeal of happiness, running her finger across the clear plastic sleeve. "Graham Cooper was so adorable, back then..."

"Oh, well, if you're going to be like that, I'll put it back then," I huffed in mock jealousy.

"Curly brown hair, mod suit. It's so obvious I have a type." The upwards curl of her mouth as she glanced at me from under her eyelashes making it fairly clear she was ruffling me right back. A pause, as the smile danced on her lips. "You haven't ever thought about getting glasses, have you?"

"I have 20/20 vision," I mumbled, though, to be honest, to please Merry I'd probably have worn horn-rimmed glasses anyway.

"Hey, where are you taking it? I was just kidding," Merry complained as I picked it up and walked off.

"I'm buying it for you, you silly girl," I told her, moving back towards her just long enough to drop a kiss on her cheek before carrying the record up to the counter. Oh yes, it was totally worth it for the grateful kisses and hugs I got in front of the jealous record store clerks and the tender way she took my arm as we left the shop.

Her pager went off as we walked back down Second Avenue, and I rolled my eyes but said nothing, as she had warned me that she had put in for a cover shift on Saturday evenings ages ago, and she couldn't back out now. But her eyes lit up as she read the message, in a way that made it clear this had nothing to do with her work. "Oh my god. This is actually happening. This is really _real_ now. I can't believe it..."

"What is it?" I demanded, as she danced around me with happiness. "Come on, spill the beans. If it's really going to happen, surely you can't jinx it now?"

She beamed up at me. "Do you want to come to dinner tonight, and find out? Ely says that girlfriends and partners are invited to the celebratory meal."

"I'm not so keen on being your partner if you keep secrets from me."

But she just laughed. "I keep so many secrets from you, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Can we walk up to 28th Street?"

"Walk?" I looked at her, perplexed. "Walk, from here? Are you crazy? That's like 20 blocks!"

"I don't have the money for a cab after blowing so much on those Slur singles, and I need to save my subway token for getting back to Queens," she said with an apologetic little shrug.

"We can go back to the ATM on 4th..." I suggested, and she just looked at me with blank incomprehension for a moment, before bursting into laughter. "What?"

"And what good would that do?" she giggled.

"You said you were out of money. We could... y'know, go to the ATM and you could... take out some more?" I felt a bit patronising spelling out something so obvious, but the look of blank incomprehension on her face was actually kind of adorable.

"You're really funny," she said, the flummoxed look giving way to laughter again.

I didn't think it was that funny but still, I liked it when she laughed at my jokes. Either way, I had no desire to walk 20 blocks. "OK, OK, I'll pay for the cab," I offered. "Though that Graham Cooper you have the hots for never would."

"Thank you, how can I ever repay you?" she laughed, patting the bag that contained the photo disc of her favourite guitarist.

"You can tell me what your big secret is."

"Oh alright, if you're going to sulk otherwise." We crossed the road, and I hailed a cab going uptown. "Ely's been having these meetings with this big-name producer who is interested in signing us to some kind of development deal." 

I felt a cold chill go down my spine, but pushed it quickly out of my mind, and tried to act more excited and supportive for my girlfriend. "Really? That's awesome."

"Well, you know what Ely's like. Paranoid as fuck, suspicious that everyone in the business is trying to rip him off, and of course the producer asked either for points on the album, or else a buy-out fee if we do get signed and go with someone else..."

"Points on the album is pretty standard for a big name producer. It's a big risk for them, especially considering you're fairly unknown. But buy-out clauses are easy, Windlass deals with them all the time."

She squeezed my hand gratefully. "It is so good having you around. You understand this stuff a lot better than I do - I just wish you could talk to Ely and assure him that it is totally standard."

"But you're going to do it, right?" I actually felt sick with nerves for my girlfriend, even though, under it all, there was a part of me that was more sick with envy. If it wasn't for that fucking business with Darin, a similar sort of thing might be happening to us.

"You bet we're going to do it. That's what we're going to the restaurant for, to sign the papers, and then celebrate. We'll be going up to his studio upstate in a couple of weeks to start recording."

"After the Mercury Lounge, gig, of course..." I insisted.

"Of course," Merry shrugged lightly. "Gabe is totally excited about that gig. Give him a break from Ely. But honestly... Ely still keeps looking for the catch and as far as I can work out, the music business is _all_ catches. You just have to do it anyway, and hope the catches aren't too bad. I trust this guy; I like him. OK, I've only met him once - funnily enough, that first night that you and I went on our first date..." She turned and squeezed my hand affectionately. "...but he was no bullshit, you know what I mean? Or rather, he told us up front what the bullshit would be, and we could take it or leave it. I appreciated that."

The taxi pulled up outside an expensive looking Chinese restaurant in Murray Hill, and she climbed out while I paid the driver. Suddenly she turned and caught me by the lapels, just staring at me with an expression of sheer delight. "You are so adorable, you know that, right?"

I looked down, blushing, and my hair fell into my face. My _about to be a rock star_ girlfriend thought I was cute. No, I could not stay envious for long. "I fucking daw you."

"I daw you, too." Bending over, she kissed me, a real, passionate, proper kiss, tongues and all, then took me by the hand and led me into the restaurant.

And there, sitting at the best booth in the restaurant, between Elisha and a small, dark, attractive woman that must have been Mandy, sat Barry Michaels, pouring a round of expensive wine. Super-producer Barry Michaels, who I'd worked so hard to get to come down to the Lacuna Lounge to check out Metropolis. And he'd only gone off and discovered Down Time instead.

There was no way it wasn't going to be awkward, but Barry, at least, made the best of it, as Elisha stood up, and made the unnecessary introductions. "You remember our bass-player, Mary, and this is her, uh... boy-thing, Daniel."

I winced at the description, but it didn't sound like Elisha's nickname, it sounded like a Merry-ism. Although I understood her weird thing about labels, and perhaps even liked the whole 'daw' construction, for some reason, _boy-thing_ , especially in Elisha's mouth, annoyed me, and I found myself unreasonably irritated at it, and maybe even her.

"Oh, we've met. In a funny little way, it was Dan who first turned me on to you guys. Good to see you again, Dan," boomed Barry, extending a warm handshake across the table.

"Of course you have," purred Merry as the two of us slid into the two remaining seats at the table. "Danny knows positively _everyone_ ; he's so well connected. He works for Windlass records, I mean, how cool is that? But his real thing is playing guitar. Have you heard his band, Metropolis? They're so brilliant, he's too utterly talented, it's just not fair. Oh, you've got to hear them, he's so good."

I flushed, stuck immediately by two almost conflicting emotions. The first was pride, mingled with a little bit of regret for doubting her, upon noticing how casually and yet how whole-heartedly she was _bigging me up_. But the second was more complex, noticing and noting this strange new personna that she slipped into so easily when dealing with a powerful man. The Merry I knew swore like a sailor and blustered combatively with me. But this Merry, who casually trotted out phrases like "utterly" and "positively everyone" and batted her eyelashes like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, she didn't entirely feel like a stranger, in fact she felt terribly, intimately familiar, like I'd met her somewhere before, and often. But she just didn't feel like _my_ Merry.

This familiar-unfamiliar Merry, she sipped her wine, and juggled the table's conversation like a set of bouncing balls, drawing out Barry Michaels with delicate compliments he seemed not to notice were aimed at flattering him, and getting him to reminisce with tales about rock stars he had known and worked with. And as amusing and educational as it was  - and wow, I had never know _that_ about Iggy Pop - something about the conversation bothered me. But it was not until Merry dropped her hand below the table, gave my thigh a quick squeeze, then turned in a quiet moment to catch my eye, and mouth "Daw you!" at me, that I realised what it was. She was so skilled at flattering men into doing what she wanted - signing record contracts, buying ice cream, paying for another round of very expensive wine - without them even noticing, that I wondered, did she do the same thing with me? And did I fall for it just as blindly?

But then the waitress came and brought our food, and asked if we were all sharing, and Merry smiled at me then nodded at the waitress, and said "Well, the two of us are sharing, but we can't share with the group..." before turning to the rest of the table and quietly explaining "Sorry, but we're vegetarians, you see." Oh! The sweetness of that 'we'.

As we ate, I listened as Merry turned to work her charm on Elisha. First she bigged him up for a short while, talking about how long they'd worked together, and how impressed she'd been with his music, then drawing him out to talk about the plans they had for their first record. Elisha still wasn't entirely convinced, but Merry was both buttering him up and goading him to bring Barry into their plans. And Barry was eating it up, getting more and more excited about Elisha's wilder ideas - though to be fair, they were good ideas - and talking at speed about how he could help the group accomplish them. Really, I had to admire Merry. I knew that she had no intention of leaving that restaurant without her signature on a contract of some nature, and she was pushing, subtly but irresistibly, to make sure it happened.

"You guys understand what it means, when I say I'm going to Produce you, right?" Barry explained, addressing himself mostly to Elisha, but taking in enough of the table that I felt myself drawn into the conversation, too, listening with pricked ears. "I see myself taking an active, creative role in your musical development. I'm not just going to sit back and just record you like an engineer."

"Yeah, and that's what I'm worried about," interrupted Elisha. "I write our songs, I design our sounds, I handle every... minute... sonic... aspect of our music. I don't know that we need yet another _creative_ element in the mix. You know what they say about too many cooks. That's my job."

"I hear what you're saying, most definitely," Barry agreed. He always seemed to start every statement with an agreement, just before going on to tear the rest of it apart. "You're the songwriter, totally. You're the creative engine, but it's my job to get the best performance out of you, to tune you like a motor, put in the right gas, adjust the gearbox. To take that energy and that drive, and channel it in the right direction."

"I think we already know what direction we're going in," Elisha insisted. "I can already hear, all of the songs, how they are supposed to sound, arrangements, and all, inside my head. I don't need anyone meddling with that."

"Oh no, my job is not to meddle. My job is to extract those sounds that you hear in your head, and get them down on tape. I do all my own engineering, me and my Tape Op, Ken, but you will definitely be involved in the mixing process, I promise you. We will get the best record you can possibly make, and hopefully one that will sell well, too."

"I don't want to be pushed into making a record I don't love, no matter how well you think it's going sell," Elisha sputtered. "These songs are my babies, I'm not doing that to them."

"Nothing will go down on tape that you don't love," Barry promised. "But it's my job to show you the possibilities, work out what you really do love, and how we can make that better. At every step of the game, in pre-production, mixing, post-production, mastering..."

"Wait, wait, wait," Gabe broke in abruptly, and everyone turned, shocked at the soft-spoken man's sudden volume. "You guys are getting way ahead of me. I get that a record has to have a producer, like Phil Spector or King Tubby. But all these words - tape-op, engineer, mixing, mastering, post-production... what the fuck are you lot on about? Can someone explain?"

Barry took a sip of wine, and ploughed in. "OK, Producer is one of those words that means so many things to so many people. In dance music, they mean it as 'guy that writes the track start to finish' while other people mean it as 'guy in an armchair who turns up once and fires the engineers and replaces the rhythm section with session guys' so maybe I should break it down. I see myself almost like a Film Director. You guys are the actors, but Elisha here is like the script writer..."

"I am not _just_ a screenwriter," Elisha protested. "I want to direct my own damn film."

"OK, do you want to tell me what kind of compressors to use on your vocals, then?" It was hard to tell if Barry was bluffing or completely serious. Elisha wisely shut up. "No? Because those are the kinds of decisions I see it's my job to help you with."

"Look, think of it this way," I finally countered, leaning across the table. "You all know how films get made, right?"

Gabe and Elisha both nodded, as Mandy rolled her eyes. "I think they're all pretty au fait with the frustrations of film-making from being around me."

Barry sat back, and sipped his wine as he watched me carefully, as I slowly explained all the different roles involved in making a record. "A Producer is like a film director, their job is to make the record happen, and capture a certain aesthetic. Guys like Rick Rubin or John Leckie - you hire them for _their_ sound. A John Leckie album is always going to sound like a John Leckie album, whether it's the Stone Roses or XTC. But there are so many other ways of thinking about production, and so many other ancillary roles around it. 

"There's Engineering, which is kind of like the equivalent of cinematography, of getting the sounds down on tape, like actually capturing the images on film. People like Steve Albini, they say they're just Engineers, because they try not to impose their aesthetics on the band, they just capture what's already there, really raw and immediate. They're mostly interested in sound levels, compression, mic placement. Technical shit. You guys don't want to muck about with that, let Barry and his Tape Op do that."

"Fair enough," conceded Elisha. "Can we hire Barry just as an Engineer, and skip the development stuff and the points on the record?"

Barry shook his head slowly. "You couldn't afford me," he snorted.

"What are these 'points' you keep going on about?" asked Gabe, still sounding confused.

"Percentage points of our royalties," Merry whispered back. "We don't pay him up front, but he takes a percentage of everything we sell."

"Then there's Mixing," I continued. "Which is like the editing process, assembling all of the useable takes into a single, cohesive narrative. And he has offered, that you can be totally involved in the mixing process, so you are going to have the ultimate say in what film looks like - or rather, how the record ends up sounding. That's the really super-important bit, from your point of view, right, Elisha?"

"I suppose," Elisha mumbled, shooting a glance back at Mandy.

"What's all that other shit, then," wondered Gabe. "Pre-production, post-production, mastering, all that shit?"

"That's like... I dunno, special effects. Like, say you're shooting Star Wars, and you want a scene in space, so you shoot it on a sound stage and send it off to Industrial Light and Magic, and when it comes back, there's stars and spaceships in all the backgrounds, and the light sabres glow and go sccchhhhuuummmm and stuff."

The whole table burst out laughing as I mimed cutting up their Peking Duck carcass with a light sabre. Barry grinned and reached over to clap me on the back appreciatively. "You've got a good head on your shoulders, lad. Now I understand what Bebe sees in you. You're very bright."

"OK, I get it. So you're going to produce, and engineer... but we're going to have the final say on mixing," Elisha tried to pin down.

"Most definitely," Barry agreed. "Do you understand now?"

Between the main course and desert, Barry got up to use the can, leaving the musicians alone at the table, and all of us bent forward conspiratorially.

"So we're going to do this, yeah?" insisted Merry, her eyes flashing.

"Sounds too good to pass up, to me," Gabe agreed. "He's worked with Dead Letters, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Iggy Pop... even Cindy Birdweather! It's like everyone he touches turns to gold records. Sign me up."

"I don't know, guys..." Elisha dithered. He glanced over at Mandy again, but she was staying out of it, so he turned his gaze on me, the only other outsider. "What do you think, Dan? You must know this guy, at least professionally."

I sipped my wine and considered, weighing carefully the conflict between supporting my girlfriend, and telling Elisha my misgivings. Or were they _really_ my own misgivings, and not just envy that it had happened for their band and not mine? "He's got a very good reputation in the business, he's known to be really sound." Merry nodded and squeezed my hand again under the table. "But I do have to ask, have you had a lawyer look over the contracts?"

"Yes." Elisha nodded. "My father had his lawyer go over it with a fine-toothed comb. It's Kosher."

"There! There's no reason not to do it," Merry announced triumphantly.

"She's so keen," giggled Gabe, looking over at her with that same mischievous spark to his eyes that sometimes made them look like brother and sister, despite their obvious physical disparity. "It's so funny, Dan, do you know what she said when we were driving back from our first meeting with him?"

"Oh god, shut it, you tosser," she warned affectionately, but I looked expectantly at the drummer, just happy to have my sweary, combative girlfriend back.

"We were driving back in the van, yeah? On our way home, we're talking about whether we should do it, right? Sign a contract? And Ely here, he says, 'oh god, this is gonna happen, isn't it? We really could do this. We could make the most amazing, game-changing, once in a lifetime work of art, album of the decade in Spin Magazine' or some such bollocks like that..."

" _Bollocks_?" laughed Elisha, the British word sounding ridiculous in his broad New York accent. "You know what this one said? He said 'fuck all that arty wank bollocks, I just want to make a shedload of money and retire rich.'"

"And then you know what Merry here said?" whispered Gabe, ignoring the daggers she was shooting him across the table. "She said, and I quote, 'I don't care about the critics and I don't care about money, I just want to have male models snort cocaine off my tits in the bathroom of the Lacuna Lounge!'"

As Elisha and Gabe collapsed into laughter, Merry shot me an apologetic glance, then glared at her bandmates. "Fuck you guys, just... fuck you."

"She did, though," Gabe insisted. "She totally did!"

I looked back and forth between Gabe and Merry, decided it was just friendly banter, and really, when it came down to it, I preferred my bawdy, direct, larger than life girlfriend just the way she was. "Well, if that's what you want, I'm sure Dieter could oblige you."

"Fuck you," she laughed and lashed out, smacking the side of my thigh.

"I'm kidding," I assured her, and moved my chair closer, wrapping my arm around her waist, despite her protestations, and planting several kisses on her neck and hair-covered ear. "And you'd better be, too," I whispered once she'd stopped struggling and settled into my embrace.

She turned and looked straight into my eyes. "Think about it. It was the evening we'd had our first date. I meant _you_ , dummy. All dressed up like a male model in your little mod suit." And an electric shock went right down my spine as I realised she'd gone away from that first date, wanting me as much as I wanted her. When would the force of her desire for me stop surprising me?

Barry reappeared, clapping his hands before digging into the briefcase he'd left beneath the table. "Right! Are we going to do this?"

"Well, we're going to order desert, I think..." Elisha stalled.

"Yes, we're going to do this. We're going to sign," Merry insisted, her eyes glinting with steely determination. "But only if you buy us ice cream."

"Right." Barry produced a sheaf of four sets of papers and a pen. "Ice cream all round... and champagne."

I knew that Merry was delighted about it, I could practically feel her humming with excitement in the taxi cab back to my flat. But despite, or maybe because of the dizzy champagne drunk, my mind was a whirl of emotions. I knew she deserved it, and I knew that deep down, I was happy for her. But in the back of my head, I kept thinking... I've worked so hard; _why her and not me_?


	8. We Are All Prostitutes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Gabe from Down Time playing drums, Metropolis play a blinder of a set, but can they impress the assembled Record Company People at the Mercury Lounge? But afterwards, Dieter's choice of venues for an aftershow proves... problematic.
> 
> And just as Daniel's band is finally starting to sort itself out, can he handle the revelations of the secrets Merry has been hiding about her job and her past?

Over the next few weeks, little changed, except on paper. The recording sessions had to wait until Barry finished some business with another band in California, so they delayed the start until well after the Mercury Lounge gig. By then, hopefully, spring would be underway, and Barry's mountain top studio in Upstate New York would be a more welcoming prospect. But for the time being, between rehearsals and late-night waitress shifts, Merry was still mine and mine alone. And as the weeks turned into months, and we were still holding hands and staring hungrily into one another's eyes and calling one another up just to hear each other's voice and crawling into one another's beds to sleep together, every chance we got, I stopped holding my breath, and actually started to believe that each time I saw her wasn't the last, and she really was my actual girlfriend. We were an item; Daniel and Merry. People had started to talk about us as if we a unit, and not just friends like Elisha or Doyle - we'd drop into the Lacuna Lounge on the way back to my apartment and Charlene or one of the Rocket Pops would just say "Oh, hey, it's Dan-and-Merry" and we got invited to parties and gigs just like that, as if we were a matched set. DanAnMerry. An actual couple.

I felt my heart swell with pride, the next time I saw her band, a special, intimate supper club type performance in the dimly lit Arabian Nights basement underneath the Fez. Barry was right; they really were something special. Even though it was technically a Middle Eastern restaurant that just happened to have a club downstairs, people stopped eating, and just stared up at the stage while they were on, utterly transfixed by the intense, swirling music. I tried, with my best wannabe A&R guy's brain, to come up with some genre description to apply to them - a little cinematic, a little trip-hop, a dash of Ennio Morricone, but just as much of funky Krautrock jams. In another setting, people could almost have danced to it, and I could certainly see them soundtracking some weird, freakish party scene in Vampiros Lesbos or something. But there was still very much that singer-songwritery vibe to Elisha's material, despite his funny, high, slightly fluttery voice that melded so well with Merry's backing vocals.

And I got to go home with their bass player. I still couldn't quite believe that, when I watched her up onstage, her swirling white dress hugging her body as she twisted her curves to the sinuous music. When I saw how other men reacted to her onstage, I felt a bit weird, but mostly I felt proud. _You guys can look, but she goes home with me_. And she was spending so much more time at my apartment than she did at her own, that I was starting to think of it as her home, too. I'd never been particularly territorial about my space - after all, I'd lived with Dieter for two years, and Doyle had crashed on my sofa for over a month. But it didn't feel like Merry was just staying with me. I felt like this wasn't my space, but our space, that she inhabited, and made her own, as much as I did, and I started to miss her presence, her smell, the warmth of _girl_ in my arms, on those rare nights that she wasn't there.

It was cosy, this almost-living-together thing, and suited us both, as she had housemates and I didn't. I had actually been out to her house once, helping her take her equipment home after a gig, but it had felt awkward staying the night, even though I had to admit, the train from Hunters Point across to Midtown was actually quicker in the morning than the train up from the Lower East Side. But roommates... I was not used to roommates, and certainly not three other women all trying to get through the bathroom in the morning. They seemed nice - most of them were musicians, and the heavy-metal looking black girl in the Metallica T-shirt had actually asked if I was in a band, because she thought maybe she had seen us supporting The Charms back at Brownie's, which gave me a bit of a kick - but really, I preferred being alone with Merry, and felt awkward even just holding her hand on their communal sofa as we watched the end of some James Bond film with her housemates hooting in the background.

So, mostly, over the next few months, we stayed at the apartment on Ludlow Street, which slowly became not just my home, but _our_ home.

She came to our Mercury Lounge gig, and that swelled my heart with pride, though it did little to assuage my nerves. It was true; Gabe was fine as a drummer, in fact he brought out a professional side to my band that I had never heard before. My guitar and Gabe's snare, they just locked, _tight_ , like a machine, and provided the staccato background for Dieter's Peter Hook-like lead basslines to take flight off of. But the problem, as I had predicated, was that Gabe couldn't hear those basslines, and not try to follow them, accenting them with jazzy accents on his hi-hat that threw Doyle off his stride.

It was good, though, to hear Gabe really cut loose and hammer his drum-kit on some of our rockier anthems. The contrast between the mild-mannered drummer, so soft-spoken as to be almost inaudible, and the racket he was capable of producing was almost comical. Elisha was a fool; he barely used half the man's musical range. On our blistering shoegazey set closer, _Into The Arms Of Heaven_ , Gabe hammered his tom-toms so loudly that I had to nudge my distortion up another notch for my solo. And Gabe seemed to enjoy rising to the challenge.

"That was bloody brilliant, that was," the drummer had giggled softly at rehearsal, sweat glistening on his arms as he uncapped his water bottle to drink. The rest of Metropolis stared at him with varying shades of outright admiration, catching our breaths. "Can we do that again?"

"Hot damn! Super-stoked! Yeah, let's rock it, party people!" I felt my heart pounding my chest along with Gabe's ecstatic rhythms. I'd always suspected my band could sound like _this_ , with the right drummer, but never had the chance to prove it. We were going to blow the fucking roof off the Mercury Lounge!

We were supporting some buzzy British band - a hotly tipped combo called Bellyflop, who the NME had declared "the best band in Britain" on the basis of, like, 2 singles and a Peel Session - so it was imperative that we were perfect. People would be watching this show, and not just the usual East Village scenesters, but the Industry movers and shakers who decided which bands would take off and tour the US beyond New York and LA. Half the A&R Department at Windlass were going to be there, and I had actually persuaded - or rather, Bebe Newcolm had persuaded - them to come early and catch a couple of songs by the support band. Us.

Doyle and Dieter got there late, and set up their gear in the tiny space allotted to us, as Bellyflop not only refused to let us share a backline, but also refused to move their kit out of the way, and suffered us only the most perfunctory of soundchecks. With Darin, that kind of thing would have been a disaster, but Gabe handled it like the pro he was. And when Merry appeared, and clung to my side, holding my arm and posing demurely while I schmoozed, I felt on top of the world. Her clothes always fit the occasion, and in her crop-top Kenickie ringer T-shirt and her A-line miniskirt, she even looked like the perfect Brit-Pop girlfriend. I handed out a few more demo CDs - and Merry even managed to slip one to a guy from Destructive Records, over all the way from England for a meeting with the fucking Charms - and started to feel more confident. Amy, the club manager, came over, and gave us the five minute warning, and I rounded up my bandmates, astonished to find them all already present and accounted for, and none of them drunk.

Gabe adjusted his in-ear monitors - in-ear monitors! I had never heard of such a thing until Gabe produced them and asked the soundman for a mix - then counted us off, and away we went. Yes! This was the band I wanted. I couldn't believe what a difference it made, not having to fight against Darin all the time. Without having to mash my guitar into a staccato wall of metronome to keep everyone in time, I was able to kick back, relax, even dance about the stage, or at least the tiny portion of the stage between my amplifier and pedalboard. As I threw my head back and mouthed the words along with Doyle's lyrics, I realised how long it had been since I had actually enjoyed myself at a gig. It was supposed to be fun. But this wasn't just fun; this was transcendent! The lights, the smiling girls in the front row, my own delighted girlfriend dancing on a table at the back.

Looking over, I caught Dieter's eye and grinned, cocking a sharp power chord at him. Dieter, of course, never cracked so much as a smile onstage, but his eyes twinkled, and we started to shake our shoulders back and forth at one another, marching up to one another as if we were going to have a fight, dancing at one another for a few bars before I leapt back to my corner of the stage to stomp on a guitar pedal. I was so proud of my band, I wanted to stop tearing through our set, and just press pause, borne up on the elation, and hold that moment in my mind forever. At that moment, I didn't care if we were playing to half the movers and shakers in New York, or to three men and a dog in a grotty bar on Bedford Ave. I just wanted to savour the realisation that we finally sounded halfway decent.

It was good. No, it was really good, occasional jazz fill and all. And as the last chords of the final song rang out and died away, I felt a kind of euphoria. Things were going to _happen_ again, I could feel it. We'd got lazy, with Darin, been content to just circle back and forth along the same circuit between the same scenester venues downtown, but now I was convinced I could take us all the way, break us out into the next level, if I only played my cards right. Merry wasn't the only person in this relationship that could get a band discovered.

We packed up our gear quickly and stowed it backstage, and I emerged to triumphant hugs from my girlfriend, accepting beers and compliments from old friends and pleased strangers. I could see the awe and surprise on people's faces - that was Metropolis? That Metropolis? How long had Metropolis been sounding like _that_? The crowd had really filled out, and the Mercury Lounge was way over capacity. The Rocket Pops were holding court at a table in the back with Blandford Lannings - yeah, suck on this, Blandford, I knew the Motivators had tried to push their way on the bill too, and Amy had turned them down flat - and at least two Charms were in attendance. Dieter would be sure to get a kick out of that; maybe one of them would shag him now we were famous enough to play the Mercury. I shook a few hands, handed out a few more demo CDs, then suddenly I saw a man in a battered trilby trying to get my attention. Was that the not-Polish, not-Metal drummer? I'd given up ever hearing from him again.

"Dude!" exclaimed the man, reintroducing himself as Ricardo, from Dallas. "That was, like, a different band. I really dig your new drummer."

"Thanks, though he's not actually ours to keep. He plays in my girlfriend's band." There was a brief interlude as I introduced Merry, and Ricardo bought us all drinks, but then he persisted.

"I'm glad I came back to see you. Though, I must admit I was much more impressed by the CD than I was that last gig," Ricardo told me. "Your singer, he's got some pipes on him."

"Doyle? Yeah, he's good, isn't he." I looked around for our singer, but given the French girlfriend was out of town again, I didn't have high hopes for peeling him off the ladies. Merry had disappeared again, so I was stuck with the now unneeded drummer.

"So I guess I missed my chance; doesn't look like you're looking for a drummer any more." I shook my head sadly. "Wow, things move fast in this town. I just went down to Texas to sort some shit out. Though at least I brought my Gretsch kit back up. Let me know if things change."

"Do you have a card or something?" I remembered to ask. Unattached drummers were like hens teeth in the city, and having one in my back pocket could be an ace in the hole.

"Yeah, sure." Ricardo pulled out a wallet and supplied a dodgy looking business card emblazoned with 'Dick the Stick' and a pair of flaming dice. I winced slightly, while Ricardo shrugged apologetically. "My girlfriend did 'em for free. Don't laugh."

"I'll hang onto this..." I started to say, but I felt someone poke me in the ribs - that could only be Merry, yes, and Merry was dragging a terribly familiar looking man forward to meet me.

"This is my super-talented boy-thing," I heard her announce, and I was still not quite reconciled to that description, when I recognised the man I was being introduced to. "Daniel, this is Charlie Fields, he's the vice president of Three Square Records, and he fucking loved your show..." Her voice lowered to a hiss in my ear as we shook hands, and as Charlie pumped my hand and asked for a demo, Jesus Christ, at that moment, I could have _married_ Merry for finding him.

We ended up in a knot at the front bar for most of Bellyflop's set, though Merry and Gabe disappeared to watch the more famous band, as us three remaining members of Metropolis - and Dick the Stick, along for the ride - took turns being bought drinks by, and trying to chat up Charlie from Three Square. It wasn't a big label - nothing like Windlass - but they had a good reputation and a decent roster. The Rocket Pops had put out their first EP on Three Square, and look what was happening to them now, starting to blow up, with heavy rotation on college radio and everything.

So we drank until the Mercury Lounge closed, then after a brief excursion while I packed all of our gear in a taxi to take it round the corner back to mine, we took off for some late night venue Dieter said he knew about. There wasn't a queue, and for that I was grateful, though the heavy cover charge stung, even though the bouncer, oddly, didn't charge Merry. The light inside was weird, dark, but red-tinged, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. Then suddenly there was a man in my face telling me there was a three drink minimum if we wanted a table, and no talking to the girls.

 _Girls_? I thought to myself, taking Merry by the hand and leading her to the table as Charlie arranged to get bottle service. And then I looked up, behind the bar. Oh. _Those_ kind of girls.

It wasn't that I was offended or put off by the sight of naked women; I'd got quite used to the sight of Merry wandering around my apartment in the altogether. But girls, standing, listlessly posing, on a high shelf behind the bar, moving slowly but imperceptibly along as if they were on a conveyor belt, that was fucking weird. Had Dieter brought us to a fucking _strip_ club? I glanced over at Merry to see how she was taking it, but she seemed nonplussed, more interested in making sure that Charlie got a drink from his own bottle, though I did notice her shoot an unreadable expression up towards the girl currently standing spread-eagled across the top of the bar.

Oh, Christ, how long could it take us to drink this fucking bottle of cheap vodka or whatever and get the fuck out of here? I didn't like seeing Merry in this kind of environment - not that I was even particularly comfortable there myself. Another girl appeared, this one not up on the shelf above the bar, but tottering across the floor on impossibly high heels and a dental floss bikini bottom. I tried not to look at her bare breasts as she passed, but it was somehow easier than looking her in the face and seeing the dead-eyed expression there. She moved towards us and I ripped my eyes away, but then realised that Dieter was beckoning her over. 

Oh, for fucks sake. I knew for a fact that Dieter had already had his cock sucked in the backstage bathroom of the Mercury Lounge once that evening, but now he was gesturing to this stripper? It wasn't even about sex, with Dieter, I realised, it was about using his looks to have power over someone else. But it wasn't his looks this girl wanted, it was the dollar bill he was waving at her. She jiggled a bit and proffered her buttocks towards him as Dieter howled with amusement, then he delicately tucked the dollar bill into her G-string and snapped the elastic. That startled the dead-eyed look off her face, but the expression was one of utter loathing. "No touching!" She turned towards me, as if wondering if I would have a go, but then her eyes fell on Merry.

Suddenly her face lit up. "Mary!"

Merry's eyes flickered, and then she grinned. "Gina?" Climbing to her feet, she threw her arms around the nude girl, and they hugged, as if they were just two old school friends, and it wasn't completely weird that one of them was butt naked. "You look great!" Mary lied, shouting in her friend's ear.

"You think? It's the implants," Gina boasted, and the first genuine expression of pleasure she'd made all night drifted across her face. "Went up two cup sizes, getting loads of work now. Perky, too, and almost no scar." She cupped her breasts and held them up until I could see a tiny scar-white semi-cirle underneath each. "Look, Mary, be a doll, walk me to the bathroom?"

"Sure thing. I'll cover you if you cover me." And with that the two of them locked arms and disappeared, leaving me completely flummoxed. Another woman came over, and Dieter repeated the whole embarrassing charade, this time getting Doyle and Charlie to have a go, too - though I noticed with interest that Ricardo sat this game out. Maybe with a Polish doll-woman that beautiful at home, he didn't have time for strippers, no matter how attractive this one's buttocks were.

"No touching," the girl admonished, slapping Charlie's hand as he reached for the rounded globes of her ass. Then she saw Doyle, lounging, smirking, in the shadows, and she smiled. "Well, maybe for you, honey, I'll make an exception."

Dieter hooted with laughter, and did another shot from Charlie's bottle as the girl vibrated her ass in front of Doyle's torn-looking face. She was so not his usual type, but it was obvious that the proximity and liquor had lowered his inhibitions, and his trousers were tenting. "How much for a private lapdance?" Dieter pushed, leering up at her.

"Half price for Blondie, here. Oh what the hell... I'll hit both of you up for the price of one," she offered, and Doyle's face broke into a disbelieving grin. "Booths in the back, you paying?"

Doyle and Dieter exchanged glances, then caught and held each others' gaze, as if this were just yet another competition, a game of chicken to see who backed out. And then Dieter climbed to his feet, grabbing Doyle by the arm and bundling him after the stripper with the incredible buttocks.

"Dieter!" I hissed, catching my friend by the arm. "What the fuck are you doing? As if you, of all people, needs to pay a girl for sex?"

"Don't be silly," shrugged Dieter. "You don't pay hookers for sex. You pay them to _leave_ , afterwards."

"Are you _crazy_? Do you have any idea what you could catch from these chicks?" I stalled, desperately, though I could see that stayed Doyle for a moment.

"You're so stupid, Daniel. You can't catch anything from having a girl suck your dick." Dieter insisted.

"You're really going with a prostitute?" I stuttered.

"We're all prostitutes of one form or another. Have you forgotten your Adorno so quickly? To argue otherwise is just quibbling over semantics." Dieter's eyes glinted. And with that, he and our singer both disappeared following the girl.

Finally, Merry reappeared, walked Gina across the room, supporting her arm as the nude girl stumbled on her five-inch heels, then slipped back to my side. She didn't even enquire as to Dieter and Doyle's disappearance, she just shot me an unmistakable look. "What took you so long?" I hissed.

"They take the doors off the stalls in the bathroom, so the girls have to pay to use the booths in the back for private lapdances. I watched out for her as she pissed, then she watched for me."

I felt a slight burst of relief, but not much. "Can we just go now?" We exchanged awkward glances, then, to my relief, she just nodded, and picked up her bag to follow me out.

 

\----------

 

Dieter got The Clap. I didn't want to say _I told you so_ , but Jesus fucking Christ, did I ever tell Dieter so. Dieter just made a face, and told me it probably wasn't even the stripper, it must have been that girl at the Mercury Lounge, because Doyle had also been tested, and he was fine. But for two weeks, Dieter sweated it out on antibiotics, and kicked up such a fuss over a slight raised temperature that he broke out in cold sores, and I couldn't help but look on those ugly marks all over Dieter's normally handsome mouth as some kind of punishment from the goddess of love.

But still, it meant that Dieter was out of commission for two weeks because he couldn't even leave the house with a face full of cold sores, let alone go to rehearsal, so somehow the plan of training up the underage Dylan fell behind even more. And now, I wasn't quite so sure I wanted to be responsible for a 17 year old boy being exposed to Dieter's noxious influence. Hell, I wasn't quite so sure I wanted Doyle being exposed to it, and Doyle was 23 years old.

Yet, somehow, the goddess of love smiled upon me. I never stopped being amazed every time I opened the door of my apartment, upon getting home from work, and saw Merry there, frying onions in the kitchen, to make veggie curry, or falafel, or quiche for our supper. And I started to think, waitress or no, this was the kind of girl I could marry, then quickly stopped myself. Two months. I'd known her only two months.

And Clap or no, Charlie had miraculously kept in touch, and though his release schedule was a bit busy at the minute, he could definitely foresee doing a single or an EP with Metropolis, just to test the waters for a full-length. It wasn't _signed_ , but it was certainly incentive to sort that bloody drummer situation out. ' _Bloody_ '? Since when did I say 'bloody'? Even my parents didn't say 'bloody'. I had been hanging out with Brits too much and by 'Brits" I meant _Merry_.

 

\----------

 

But Merry had secrets, as she had long warned me, and it did take months for them to start to come out, when I was too deep in love and we were both too deep in each others' lives to back out.

I was lying on the sofa with my favourite girl, twined together, reading our way through the mountain of the Sunday New York Times, my feet up on her lap, her arms twisted around my legs, even as she balanced the magazine across my knees. It was cold, and dazzlingly bright outside, the sunlight refracted into a million spots of diamond light by the snow and ice crystals. So much for Spring; but perhaps it would have arrived by the time Down Time's session was booked.

"Shall I put on another pot of tea?" she offered, shifting slightly.

"No. I don't want you to move, you're very warm."

"You know I'm going to have to get up in half an hour and go to work."

"Don't go to work, stay here with me," I wheedled. "We can have a lie in, maybe go out to Manhattan Cafe when it's warmed up a bit."

"You know I can't miss the Sunday Brunch shift, especially after not working all weekend. It's one of the most lucrative shifts for tips."

"So I'll come with you. I've never seen where you work, though I can't imagine it's better for brunch than the Manhattan Cafe..."

Suddenly she froze, and shot me an icy look. "Don't be ridiculous."

That look was a challenge to me. "What, are you ashamed of me now? You don't want your posh restaurant to see your scruffy rocker boyfriend? I'll put on a suit, you know I scrub up nicely." It was a joke; I didn't ever wear a single article of clothing that could be qualified as even remotely 'rocker'. I owned precisely one pair of jeans, black of course, but they were an exclusive Italian brand that had cost more than my best shoes.

"You can't. It's members only."

Although I'd never given Merry's job much thought, beyond observing that it must have been a classy joint from the large tips she brought home on Friday or Saturday nights, this piqued my interest. "Surely you can get me in on a staff pass or something... No? Then how do I become a member?"

"You don't. Leave it, Danny." Pushing my legs off her lap, she climbed off the sofa and started to go about the flat, gathering her things together, though she'd already said she didn't have to leave for another half an hour. I knew I should have left it at that, but still. It bothered me, the idea that she had this private part of her life that she couldn't even tell me about, let alone share.

"What's it called? I'll look it up in the phone book and ask them myself."

"It's not in the phone book."

"Wait. That matchbook you gave Doyle... They must have had the phone number on it." I dug around in the mess of paraphernalia that Doyle had left scattered across the smoking windowsill. The last time he had been round, his lighter had given up the ghost, so Merry had dug in her handbag and supplied a book of matches from her workplace. Doyle had smirked at them, and raised his eyebrows at her, but a single freezing glance from Merry could always stop Doyle in his tracks. She was good, my Merry, she had a good influence on all of us. I found the matchbook. Bennington, that was the name, with an old fashioned, very old money, Ivy League look to the logo: thin, elegant white script on a Harvard Blue background, with a glossy gold apogee underneath. No phone number, so I flicked it open, and suddenly I saw what Doyle had been smirking at, the colour rising to my cheeks, half with embarrassment and half with anger.

"What is this?" I asked, extending the photo towards her, as if challenging her to deny or explain. Because on the inside cover was a soft focus black and white photo of Merry, wearing a lace corset and what looked for all the world, almost exactly like a Playboy Bunny costume, except for the lack of ears and a tail. She was leaning forward, her eyes huge, her lips parted so I could see the shiny glimpse of her tongue, her breasts practically spilling out of the top of the brief costume. There was a fake name - Mitty St.Marie - and a four letter code, like a phone extension or an expense account. "I thought you said you were a waitress."

"I _am_ a waitress," she insisted defiantly. "I'm a cocktail waitress."

"You look like a stripper," I snorted. With any other woman, I would have seen the funny side, thought it was cute and flirty. It was the kitschy kind of vintage thing that Dieter and Doyle loved, wanted to use on our flyers sometimes. But somehow it was different when it was not some anonymous 1920s Flapper, when it was _my_ girlfriend.

"And what if I was a stripper?"

I could feel my hands starting to shake, as if I could barely hold the matchbook in my hands for fear it would burst into flame, so I tossed the loathsome thing back onto the table, trying not to think of that terrible bar, those unfortunate, bored-looking women. "Are you a stripper?"

"I used to be." Her jaw was very tight, her voice restrained, almost clipped, as if she was holding back intense emotion.

"Christ." I turned away from her, couldn't look at her beautiful face, those lovely long dancer's limbs that normally brought me such delight, knowing now that she used them as tools to bring in her rent. That place, that awful place. I tried to imagine her shaking her buttocks in some greasy dude's face, and the image haunted me.

"What, am I not good enough for you now?" The defiance was holding back the edge of panic to her voice.

"I didn't say that." I raised my hand to my head, ran my fingers through my hair. "It's just a shock, that's all. Why..." I couldn't even bring myself to form the rest of a question. _Why are you a different girl than the one I imagined you to be_?

"It's good money, for not a lot of hours." Her voice was stronger now, but still uncharacteristically defensive. "I haven't got a degree, like you have, so that means my choices were waiting tables - long hours on your feet and unpredictable tips - or dance. One or two nights a week, that earns you two, three hundred dollars. Rent made, money left over for good equipment, printing flyers, pressing singles, that kind of thing..."

"I thought you worked as a session bassist to cover that kind of thing!" I protested.

"Are you kidding me? That's, like, fifty bucks a night, if you're _lucky_ \- not even counting rehearsals - and that's the high end, working for rich, successful twats like Blandford Lannings." I recoiled physically at the hateful name. "Fifty bucks barely even covers cab fare."

"So you're a stripper," I repeated helplessly, the mental loop of that awful, red-lighted club playing again and again in my mind.

"Not any more. I got out when it started to get dodgy; a lot of girls I knew weren't so lucky." The image flashed across my brain, of the woman in the toilet of the strip club, how well Mary had seemed to know her. "This club is much better, better organised, better paid, and with the code system, no one steals your tips. And these guys, the members, they have the money to give real tips, not just a shitty dollar in your G-string here or there." I shivered at the memory. "Plus, well, the old guys, they're a lot more respectful than the johns who go to strip bars. They don't try to _touch_ you quite so much, they just wink a lot and occasionally squeeze your bum. I think they're mostly just lonely. Some of the old guys have been known to offer to marry you when they get a bit sauced. It's not stripping, honest, it's more like... waitressing and a bit of hostess work, just wearing not many clothes." 

"Hostess work? What does that even mean?"

"Flattery, mostly. Social lubrication. Hanging around on guys' arms being decorative and entertaining, smiling and laughing at everything they say to get them to buy more drinks." There was silence between us, as I tried very hard not to look at her, trying not to even think about what that meant. "Come on, Daniel, why are you being so unreasonable about this? It's my fucking job."

"You expect me to be _happy_ about it?" With that, I finally turned around and looked at her, saw the worry, the panic in her eyes. It didn't feel fair, to look at her, to rejoice over her looks, her sea-green eyes, the mouth I loved for the smart and funny things that came out of it, as much as the things she did to me with it... and know that this face, this body, it was her meal ticket.

She shrugged lightly and gave a hopeless little smile. "I dunno. Some of the guys I've dated have kinda... you know, got off on it a little." She paused, half smirking, half rolling her eyes. "Blandford wanted me to incorporate a bit of strip-tease into the show."

Fucking Blandford, of course he would. Then the full importance of what she'd just said hit me full on in the chest. It only added insult to injury. "You _dated_ Blandford Lannings?" Of course she had, I'd known it from the moment I first saw them together, the way he rested his arms so lightly on the small of her back. Now that just wasn't fair. Fucking Blandford, he always got everything first... but even Merry?

Squirming awkwardly, she wrung her hands. "Well, I don't know that _dated_ is the right word. Whatever it was, it was for about five minutes, and it was a mistake from start to finish. Stupid me, I actually thought he wanted to have some kind of full-on musician-muse _relationship_. He just wanted not to have to pay me for the session work."

 _You could have just had him pay you for the sex_. The words danced on my tongue, but I had the good sense to shut my mouth before they could come spilling out. That would have been the end for me and Merry, if I'd said that, and I knew it. And that thought, the thought of not _being_ with Merry, that shocked and terrified me more than the thought of her stripping, more than the thought of her fucking Blandford Lannings, even more than the thought of her spending the rest of the afternoon being letched over by lonely old rich men.

I knew I had to say something, I saw her looking at me, shrugging lightly, almost apologetically, her eyes full of both defiance and fear. So I went to her, and put my arms around her waist, and leaned my head against her shoulder, burying my face in her soft, clean hair, then pushed my crooked nose into her ear, and softly whispered "I daw you anyway."

She put her arms around me and hugged me tightly, fiercely. "Oh god, Danny, I daw you, too. I just wish it didn't matter to you."

"I can't pretend it doesn't matter... but I will not hold it against you."

"Hold it against _me_?" Her laughter was caustic. "By all means, hold it against a system where a woman can earn more money in one night, taking her clothes off, than she can in a week of waitressing, or cleaning, or teaching America's children..."

"I know. You're absolutely right. It's unjust." I knew better than to try to contradict her when she was wound up politically. It was always better if I just agreed with her. And besides, she was completely right. It was the whole shitty system I resented, and cunts like Dieter who played it for laughs, not her. "I'm sorry, this is just hard for me."

At that, she pulled away, and held me at arm's length, and at that moment, it actually shocked me, the look of contempt staring back from my beloved girlfriend's face. " _Hard_?" she said, very quietly. "Hard for _you_?"

"You have no idea," I moaned, pulling myself away from her and that accusatory gaze, sinking down into the sofa, even while I was aware that it was an expensive leather chesterfield that my parents had just given me, still in perfectly good nick, exchanged for a newer version in a more fashionable colour when they'd redecorated the study.

"Oh, I have some ideas," she sighed, half laughing as she sank down into the seat next to me. Well, at least she wasn't leaving.

"You think I'm just an idiot rich boy, don't you? You think I'm one of those trustafarians, like Blandford Lannings, who can just buy whatever he wants, a band, a record contract, a publicist who can get him on the front page of the Village Voice. Well, I'm not. Things are complicated for me, too."

And at that moment, I broke down, and I told her about The Deal, exchanging secret for secret, confidence for confidence. I told her about my father, and about the place waiting for me in Asheton Industrial Accounting. I told her about the compromise I'd struck with my father, and the 25th birthday deadline. And I told her about how I'd got my job with Windlass, and indeed, what that job entailed, that it was neither glamourous nor exciting, and that I worked in the _accounting department_ , based entirely on my father's name and grandfather's reputation. All of it, the whole sordid truth I'd never told anyone, not Doyle, not Dieter - certainly not Dieter, with his philosophical ideas about artistic purity. That this band was not a game for me, like it was for Doyle, and rich idiots like Blandford and all those scenester guys. That the spectre of the accounting business was breathing down my fucking neck like the mouth of an open grave.

She just sat, listening to me, and watching me with that cool, even stare, her face an expressionless mask. And when I was done, I turned to her - for absolution, for understanding, I didn't quite know what. But she, instead of responding, smiled cruelly and started to sing.

" _Still, you'll never get it right, cause when you're laying in bed at night_..." she crooned softly, and I recognised the song instantly.

"Hey come on. Stop it," I snapped, but she was laughing now, climbing to her feet. 

"... _watching roaches climb the wall, if you called your dad, he could stop it all_..."

"That's not funny," I insisted, indignantly, but in point of fact, I had to admit, she was actually very funny, starting to do the dance now, with a keen eye for mimicry, the best Jarvis Cocker impression I'd seen since that time Dieter had donned a pair of horn-rimmed glasses for Indie-Roakie at the Loser Lounge and slayed everyone dead.

" _You will never understand, how it feels to live your life, with no meaning or control, and with nowhere left to go_..." she carried on, the words sinking closer and closer to my heart.

"Knock it off, Merry, I get the point. You can stop now." And suddenly I really, desperately wanted to hear that record.

" _You'll never live like common people_ ," she sang, as I dug in my record collection for the disc. " _You'll never do whatever common people do. You'll never fail like common people, never watch you life slide out of view, and dance and drink and screw, because there's nothing else to doo-ooo-ooo._ " She swung her hips as her hand traced circles in the air, a video we'd both seen a hundred times late at night on 120 Minutes.

"That's not fair." I had found the record, the original 7 inch single I'd bought on import, at vast expense, when it first came out, and was cueing it up on my five grand stereo.

"What do you expect me to say, Danny? Oh, you poor little rich boy. Your whole life is one giant safety net that you're trying desperately to escape, because you've fallen in love with rock'n'roll? Did you really expect me to listen to that with sympathy and nod and smile, and simper like I do to the old boys at the club, and tell you I _understand_?"

"Yes, actually I kinda did." I turned the volume up, then sat back on my heels, staring up at her as she danced. She was magnificent, really, and suddenly I understood why old men were willing to lavish fifty dollar bills on her, just for the pleasure of her company. It wasn't her sinuous hips, or even the fullness of her breasts, it was the way that she absolutely, positively refused to give in to the indulgence of self pity. Of course I hadn't genuinely expected Merry to offer sympathy or absolution, not down in the bottom of my heart. I'd expected her to laugh at me, and kick me up the ass, and tell me to get on with it. Because it was what I really needed.

She reached out to me, pulled me to my feet, and swung my arms to get me to dance with her, and suddenly, we were dancing together on my living room rug, me cutting shapes and risking a few twirls and vamps. "Oh, Danny," she sighed, her eyes finally softening with the sympathy I had thought I wanted. "I do daw you. But you can be ridiculous. I don't even think you're aware of what a cliché you are sometimes. But that almost makes it more charming, how naive you are."

For a moment, I was tempted to protest that I was hardly naive, after fifteen years of living in New York City, but then I stopped myself. I'd never even known of the existence of private clubs like Bennington, let alone set foot inside one. Maybe I was naive, compared to her. "And I suppose now you're going to give me some lecture about how you're a working class scruff from a Yorkshire mining town..."

Merry shook her head ruefully, then pulled away from our dance, collecting her things for work. "You have no idea."

"You could tell me," I offered. "Do we really have any secrets left, at this point?"

"You don't even know my real name."

"Well, it's certainly not Mitty St.Marie," I teased. Two could play this game.

She sighed, then fixed me with a defiant gaze. "Miriam Wythenshawe."

"Wythenshawe? What even is that? Isn't that near Manchester? So you are Northern?"

"My great great grandfather was the Duke of Derbyshire. No, not the miserable half, the extremely wealthy sheep-farming half. His father built half of Manchester."

I stepped back, flabbergasted. I half thought she was joking, were it not for the intense look in her eye. "Wait, if you're the granddaughter of a Duke, shouldn't you have a title? And if you have some title, what on earth gives you the right to lecture me on my family, and _my_ prospective career?"

She shook her head. "Little thing called primogeniture. Cadet line. What money there was all pissed away; death duties, inheritance tax, mismanagement back in the Edwardian age. I'm the opposite of you, Danny. Gobs of class, but not even able to afford the money for a college education. So yes, my stripping, and letting dirty old men 'accidentally' squeeze my bum in exchange for fifties, yes, that is _exactly_ the same as you pissing your youth away in the accounting department of Windlass Records, are you fucking kidding me."

"You could have gone to Williams," I pointed out petulantly. "Your mother's a lecturer there, you could probably have gone for free."

"And you could go and work for Asheton Industrial," Merry countered bitterly. "None of us want to live our parents' lives."

"You're angry at me again." I felt bad, but I didn't know how to just agree with this revelation to console her.

"I'm not angry; I'm envious. You've got a chance that none of us do. So don't blow it chasing phantoms in the East fucking Village." And with that, she picked up her bag, folded her ridiculous fluffy blue coat round her shoulders, and left.


	9. Inbetween Days, Without You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel is still so insecure and bothered about Merry's day-job as a stripper that he ends up reading her diary to try to find out the truth. Is he at all reassured by what he reads there, or will it change everything?
> 
> While Merry is away, recording in Upstate NY with super-producer Barry Michaels, Metropolis have more problems of their own. First, Dieter's inability to keep his big mouth shut ends up with serious - and potentially deadly - consequences for him. Then, Metropolis lose their third drummer in as many months.
> 
> Down Time may be on their way, but can Metropolis ever pull their act together (and will their, uptight, stressed-out guitarist ever learn to relax?)

I didn't see her for two days after that. She wasn't there in my house, when I got home from work, and I was too stubborn and proud to ring her, let alone apologise to her pager. On Monday evening, I stood my ground, and resolved not to call her, and let her come crawling back to me. On Tuesday evening, my resolve was starting to slip. I had a wank and downed half a bottle of red wine, but it didn't help at all. I wanted her, her warm body in my bed, her tinkle of laughter when I got too pompous, the silky feel of her hair against my bare chest as she slept. And on Wednesday, I gave in and rang her.

And to my surprise, and slight annoyance, she seemed to have completely forgotten the entire argument. "Oh, shit, Danny, I'm sorry. It's been such a whirlwind this week, there's so much we have to get sorted before we go into the studio this weekend."

Was it March already? "This weekend?" I stuttered. "When are you leaving?"

"Tomorrow afternoon. We need to get there before nightfall, as I don't have a clue where we're going."

"Were you even going to come round and say goodbye to me before you left?" I stared at the window at the roof opposite, feeling rather forlorn and sorry for myself.

"Oh god, I can't come round yours; I'm still packing."

"Packing? You're going to the Catskills for two weeks, not the South of France."

"I still need clothes. I'm sorry; unless you've changed your stance on my stripping career since we last spoke."

Oh. So she had not forgotten after all. But abruptly she laughed, and I realised she was not the slightest bit apologetic, she was taking the piss out of me.

I swallowed my pride and begged. "Alright, I'm sorry. Can I just come round yours tonight? I can be there in half an hour, 45 minutes, depending on the F... And I'll bring a bottle of wine, too... do you have anything for supper? No? I'll pick something up."

After sourcing a bottle of wine and ordering Chinese takeaway in Hunters Point, I made my way down Jackson Avenue to her apartment, close to the waterfront, and with a view she'd have paid through the nose for in Manhattan. I never felt at ease in that house, though thankfully, two of her housemates were out playing gigs that night, and the third was sleeping off the flu upstairs. So we ate dinner, then I sat on the edge of her futon and watched her pull out the entire contents of her closet, one outfit at a time.

"So that's where all your costumes hide," I sighed over the rim of my wineglass.

"Costumes?" she asked, perplexed, tilting a large black fedora onto the back of her head.

"That's how I used to think of you, back when you rehearsed on Ludlow Street. Every day you were wearing a different costume. Flower child, mod girl, biker chick, hippie... I loved watching you every day just to see what you'd wear," I confessed.

"I guess they are costumes, in a way," Merry observed, pulling out the white leather coat she'd been wearing that first night at the Lacuna Lounge. "The Motivators used to play at the Minds Eye a lot, and the promoters always had themes for the club nights - Land of the Pharaohs, or Biker Chic or Beach Blanket Bingo. We would really go for it, and dress all the way up. I used to buy them at Domsey's Warehouse, from the two dollar a bag bins. Cheaper than buying real clothes, but there were some real strange things in there. Didn't matter, I just made them into stage clothes." She paused, holding a 60s vintage tunic dress with an Egyptian motif. "It's funny how I went from that, to Deltawave, where Elisha was so completely anti-image in everything we did."

"I thought that wearing white all the time was a brilliant image. You really stand out from all the other Ludlow St bands in their black clothes."

She tilted her head, perplexed. "It was supposed to be the opposite of an image. Wearing all white to look totally transparent, and just act as screens for the video projector." She paused, putting the coat away and taking out the shimmering white dress with the beads on it. "I suppose no matter what you wear, it ends being a screen for people's projections. Isn't that what we do, onstage? Be looked at, projected onto?"

"Well, I certainly enjoyed looking at you. It was the highlight of every Tuesday and Thursday, seeing what costume you would come up with next."

"So that's why you were staring at me. I just thought you liked me." Her eyes flashed mischievously.

"You thought right. I think I loved your wizard robe the best. That one was good." I lay back and stared at her through slitted eyes.

Digging through her clothes, she pulled out the velvet Moroccan robe I hadn't seen in years, then slipped off her dress, and slipped it over her head. "Wizards robes... what do you think?"

"Come over here and work some magic on my wand," I teased, sprawling out across her bed, pushing my thumbs down under the belt-loops of my trousers until my hips showed.

"Daniel!" She almost looked shocked as she turned around and saw me. "That's filthy!"

I grinned, genuinely delighted to have caught her off guard. "You don't think two can play at that game?" And at that, she laughed, hitched up her skirts, shuffled onto the bed and went to work on me.

Was sex with her different, now I thought of her as a... a... Well, I didn't know what to call what she did. A stripper? A playboy bunny? A hostess? I arched my back with pleasure as she took me into her mouth, and teased me with her tongue until I was panting for release - but then came the sudden jolt of fear. How many men had she done this to, in the past? And how many of them had paid for the privilege? And as I thought that, I started to lose my erection.

She raised her head, and looked up at me, slightly alarmed. "Are you alright?"

"I'm just a bit stressed. Come here, sweetie." And I put my arms around her and held her, kissing those rose-coloured lips until I reassured myself that it didn't matter; this was still my beloved girlfriend. And then I felt myself rise again, and looked at her, and raised my eyebrows mischievously. "Have you got those condoms to hand?"

She dug in her bedside table for the box, abandonned there the last time I'd slept over, then looked up at me and pulled a serious face for a change. "I never _did it_ with any of my clients. You know that, right? I might be a stripper, but I'm not a hooker, no matter how much assholes like Dieter conflate the two."

"Not even a lap-dance?" I found myself asking, desperate to put my mind at ease. "Like, one of those back room lap-dances like Dieter and Doyle got?"

"Daniel," she warned, her face clouding over.

"Like, a hand job or whatever. Would you consider a hand job to be _doing it_..." I couldn't help it, the image of it was burning its way through my brain.

"Do you really want to know the answer to that?" Merry asked, with a flatness to her voice that really worried me. "Like, what would you do if I actually said yes?"

"I don't know," I whimpered, reaching down and tugging at my cock, which was now ridiculously erect and standing to attention. "But I need to know, OK?"

Turning around, Merry fixed me with a defiant expression. "I never did, OK? But I don't think it makes me any better of a person for not doing it. Some of the girls I knew, who did turn tricks, because they needed the money more than I did... they were beautiful people, real sweethearts who were worth a dozen Dieters. So you might be right. I did not. But you have no right at all to judge any of my friends that did."

Her eyes were so clear that relief flooded my mind. "I didn't think so, but thank you for reassuring me." I felt like a dog for wanting it, but I needed to be reassured.

"Do I pack the box, or don't I?" she asked, as she extracted a condom from inside, and suddenly I was outraged.

"And who are you planning on shagging, up in the mountains?" I demanded.

She laughed, the tension and defiance draining out of her face as she flicked the end of my nose. "I was asking if you were going to come visit me up in the mountains, you fool."

I relaxed slightly at that, and let her roll the condom down onto my swollen cock. "I'd love to, but I've no idea how I'd get there. I can't drive."

"A pity. Well, just lay back and let me do the driving tonight." Tossing the box back into the bedclothes, she climbed on top of me, and took control.

When we were done, after she climbed off me and padded out to the bathroom to clean up, I lay back on her bed, arms crossed behind my head, staring up at the ceiling, a contented grin plastered across my face. She was incredible, really, I thought as I looked up at the colourful riot of her walls. Posters and pages torn from magazines covered every available inch of the surface, a giant pin-up poster of Brigitte Bardot next to an advert for La Dolce Vita, surrounded by groovy artefacts of the 60s, Andy Warhol with Edie Sedgewick, Mick and Marianne at their trial, a pair of French beatnik kids occupying a Parisian university. Oh, and of course a photo of Graham from Slur taking up the place of pride next to her bed, and for a moment, I felt piqued. It should be me. Did she even have a photo of me? Turning over on my side, I looked at her bedside table, and was relieved to see an ornate frame containing a photo of the pair of us embracing in front of the jukebox at the Lacuna Lounge.

Hang on, what was this Moleskin notebook casually abandoned on top of her alarm clock? A diary? In my heart, I knew I should leave it be, but my curiosity overwhelmed my sense of propriety, and I picked it up. Just the first page, I told myself.  Maybe just enough to establish that this was actually a diary and I should not be reading it? Or maybe I wanted more evidence, her own private confirmation that what she'd said about her job was true. No matter what she said about how it had no right to bother me, it still bothered me, OK? I wanted the truth from her own words, and not what she sweet-talked me to reassure me.

Daily Affirmations.

_so I think this affirmations thing is total bullshit, but elisha swears by it and at this point I swear I would do anything to get a record deal. well, almost anything. right. my band is the best band in the universe. I think elisha is a brilliant songwriter, I know gabe is an amazing drummer, and... no, jesus christ this is dumb and I'm not doing it._

_dear universe: I want a record deal. my band is the best band in the universe. we are brilliant. we deserve a record deal. we deserve better gigs than third on the bill at brownie's on a tuesday night. we deserve a... this is stupid. fuck it._

_dear universe, I know you don't care and I still think this is bullshit, but I really want not to have to dance at maxy's any more. I want to not come home with my legs aching from the stilettos and my cheeks hurting from smiling flirtatiously at men I would really like to punch in the fucking face. I would like a record deal so I can look myself in the face and feel like a musician and an artist, instead of a stripper or a whore. i know all artists are whores deep down but I would like to be the kind of whore that gets to keep her dress on, thank you, universe._

_dear universe, thank you for the job at bennington. i don't ever want to have to strip again, and more specifically, i don't ever want to have to strip to shitty hair metal ever again. do you know how hard it is when some dirtbag comes in and wants you to strip to guns n roses? why is it always fucking guns n roses. those fucking tempo changes, they fuck me up every goddamn time when i'm trying to dance. ok it's not a record deal, but at least it's something._

I flipped through a few more pages, feeling ashamed of myself, but unable to stop, wondering how long she had been doing this - but also wanting to see if it made her feel any better, getting her frustrations down on paper like this. Maybe I should try doing it myself, if it worked. And then something caught my eye.

_dear universe. that is the cutest boy I have ever seen in my life. the little mod boy with the curly hair and the crooked nose. I would like him in my byrne & benbright shopping bag, please. ok, I would have to be able to afford to shop at byrne & benbright first, that would also be nice, but that would take a record contract wouldn't it, huh._

And suddenly I remembered, struggling down Ludlow St with a massive bag from Byrne & Benbright Luxury Tea Importers because my mother had bought me a whole selection of fine blended English teas for my birthday. I had completely forgotten, let alone had any idea that I was being watched. Then there were a few more pages of wanting better gigs, wanting flatwound strings for her bass, wanting a goddamn record deal already, wanting to stop working at Bennington's, and then it picked up again.

_dear universe, that boy is amazing. he bounces when he walks; I swear to god he actually bounces, like he's just so excited to be here, his smile so wide I can't help but smile when I see him. I've started coming early for rehearsal because every day, at exactly ten to 12, he comes out of his apartment, pulls the door twice to check that he's locked it, and then goes to the Pink Pony for a cup of tea - Earl Grey, milk no sugar, I always hear him tell Marge, and even his voice is cute, kinda low, quite shy - before disappearing up the street. he's got to be a student, because no one with an office job emerges at noon. but what kind of student wears a perfect 3-button Ace Face suit to class every day?_

_dear universe, I know I always ask you for a record deal, but right now, I want that boy. you know the one I mean. the one with the curly light-brown hair and the Wolverine sideburns and the slightly hooked nose and the impossibly wide cheekbones and the bright, wide-eyed expression like he is a little magic pixie-boy with a glint in those amazing, deep-set amber eyes, set just slightly too far apart, so he has this permanent expression of looking surprised. I saw him up close, and he's tiny! he's about two and a half inches shorter than me and kinda skinny - wiry, like. he's like a beautiful little doll. but I've never seen anyone with such a presence. never seen anyone project such an aura of total... like, he is so in control of his image. the cuffs of his shirt always hanging exactly one half inch below his suit jacket, his tie perfectly knotted, perfectly straight, not a hair out of place, not a whisker ungroomed, I've been watching him for a month and his hair doesn't even seem to grow. he has lips like a kitten, that turn up in this perfect little bow. he is_ _perfect_ _. well, perfect except for two tiny moles just between his jawline and his neck. I would very much like to kiss those moles, please, universe._

_oh my god, universe. can you imagine what it would be like to go to bed with a boy like that? can you imagine the care, and the attention to detail he would give to your body? kitten lips. can you imagine kissing those kitten lips? of course that would probably require my actually being able to speak in his presence, which I currently cannot, because he is so beautiful he steals the actual breath from my throat. but a girl can dream, can't she, universe?_

_dear universe, you suck. also I would like a record deal._

Then abruptly, I heard footsteps, and the handle of the door jiggled, so quickly I slammed the book shut and tossed it on top of her bag. Oh shit, that was a mistake, and as she walked into the room, she saw it, and frowned.

"Were you reading my diary?"

"Oh!" I did my best to feign innocence. "Is that your diary? I took it for a lyric book. Doyle uses Moleskins, too. It fell on me while I was trying to see what time it was. I thought you might need it in the studio."

She narrowed her eyes at me, but picked it up and satisfied herself that it was unharmed, then carried it into bed. "Well, I suppose it's not really a diary. It's this stupid list of affirmations that Elisha made us all keep for a while. Power of positive thinking and all that. Like, we were supposed to ask god, or the universe, or whatever, to make our wishes come true. Like that was going to work," she snorted.

"What did you wish for?" I asked, running my hand carefully down her back, wondering if she would actually own up to her crush.

"Ha!" she laughed haughtily, but then her face softened as she flipped through the pages. "The usual. A record deal. A less shitty job. And this..." Holding the page open with her thumb, she extended it towards me. "Read this page, but no further, please."

I took it from her and started to read.

_dear universe, I want to fuck that boy. or, more specifically, I want that boy to fuck me, with the intensity and the devotion with which he bears down on the strings of his Epiphone. I want that boy to throw himself at my body with the same enthusiasm he throws himself at his music. I want to hold that moment close, when his arm slipped and almost tightened around my shoulders, and I was sitting with my thigh jammed against his, in the front booth of the Lacuna Lounge, trying not to make it completely obvious that I was just staring at him, and I swear he was staring back? I want to hold that moment and relive it over and over again in my memory. I gave him my phone number, but a boy like that, he will never call you, will he? and I have too much pride to go chasing through the lower east side looking for his band, even though I totally could. so come on, universe, won't you give me a break? I want that boy so badly. Daniel. that's his name, I finally discovered. dare to be a Daniel. I want Daniel, universe. Oh yes, also I want a record deal, but Elisha says he has some interesting news about that, so this will have to wait._

Closing the book, I handed it back to her, feeling the blush spreading all over my face. She smiled sheepishly, and reached down and ruffled my hair, which had started to kink into waves from the sweat of our sexual exertions. I leaned towards her, carefully pulled back the fabric of the wizard's role, to reveal her pale thigh, then bent down, and with deliberate tenderness, placed two tiny kisses on either side. "Alright, I confess. I saw the earlier bit with the Byrne and Benbright bag when the book flopped open. I read... I was just so flattered and amazed that you noticed me."

"Ha! I knew you had; you're a terrible liar. Of course I noticed you. But did you even notice me back then? I had such a crush on you it wasn't even funny, back in those days, back when the Motivators used to rehearse under the Pink Pony," she confessed.

"So you asked the Universe to give me to you. And now here I am. So... well, thank you, Universe," I quipped, but she looked disappointed with that answer. "But out of all the dozens of guys on Ludlow St, why me?"

Merry smiled mysteriously. "Your shoes," she said.

"My _shoes_?" That had not been the answer I was expecting.

"You were wearing square-toed chelsea boots. Square toes, Cuban heels. Very original, very distinctive; everyone always goes for the pointy-toed ones. You were different. It was that extra detail that did it, like you always went the extra mile, in everything." She smirked, a mischievous light dancing in her eyes. "So what was it you first noticed about me?"

"Everything," I confessed.

"Everything?" she laughed. "You're going to have to do better than that."

"Merry, I thought you were the coolest girl in the Universe. I thought you were the literal, walking personification of everything I loved about music, and film, and fashion, and the whole East Village, all rolled into one pretty girl. I used to watch for you, every Tuesday and every Thursday, and whatever you were wearing would fill my fantasies for the rest of the day, like my own private showgirl. I used to think - and you are super entitled to laugh at me for this - that I would know, that my life was complete, and that I had made it, when I could not just meet, but get with, a girl like you, who was the literal embodiment of everything I believed in." I found myself caught off guard by my own candidness, as if I didn't realise how much I meant it, until it had all spilled out into the soft light of her room.

For a long time, she just sat there, staring at me, her hand still playing gently with the soft curls flowing back from my temples. But then she laughed. "Oh, Danny. Can't you just have a crush on a girl, for being a pretty girl, instead of seeing her as the literal embodiment of every sign and signifier that ever meant anything to you?"

I thought about that for a moment. "No, I can't. I sometimes wish I could, that I could just see the world as flat, and simple and two dimensional. But I can't. I can never just look at a thing, and see only that thing. It's like I have to look at that thing, and see every single possible or potential meaning lying above or below its surface."

"Even me?"

"Especially you. The more I care about something, the more layers of weight and meaning and significance accrue."

She looked at me for a long time, her face serious, as if trying to puzzle something out, but then she settled down into bed, and reached for the light. "We should go to bed. I have to get up early in the morning."

 

\----------

 

Two weeks without Merry. It was impossible. I didn't realise how much she'd sewn herself into the fabric of my everyday life, until suddenly she wasn't there any more. No satin panties mysteriously appearing at the bottom of my bed, no long blonde hairs to be extracted from the plughole before I could shower. But also no one giggling over my jokes at dinner, and no one to ask me the latest scandal of who had expensed _what_ in the incestuous world of Windlass Records, and no girl, soft and warm in my arms, on the sofa, or in my bed for me to worm my cock into. I masturbated like a fiend, sometimes even in the bathroom stalls at work, but it was no good. It wasn't just physical relief I wanted, it was Merry.

She called me once or twice, but of course, it was while I was at work, so she left a message on my answering machine, her voice burbling with enthusiasm. "Danny! Shit, I guess you've left for work already. It's just me. Things are going so well here, can't wait for you to hear the results. Barry is a fucking pro, he's a complete genius. Elisha's being weird, but what else is new. I think he just misses Mandy. But god, it is just sounding so good. Barry really _gets_ it. I'm so pleased we did this. Can't wait to play the new tracks for you. I daw you! Bye."

The machine clicked, and I played it again, but the message didn't change. I didn't really know what else I wanted - well, maybe just for her to say that she missed _me_ , the way that Elisha was missing Mandy. But then again, maybe she wasn't; maybe she was too full of excitement over Barry. No, that was unfair, and anyway, Bebe had put paid to any innuendoes over their past by informing me that Barry was 100% flaming gay, everybody in the industry knew, so don't be absurd.

But still, I missed her, and throwing myself into training up Dylan - even if I had to do it evenings and weekends, and without Dieter, who found the whole thing a bore - was clearly not as exciting as recording in the mountains with a producer slash recording genius.

I went out, I schmoozed, I went to the opening of some art show on Christopher Street that Dieter had a couple of pieces in, I held court at the Lacuna Lounge, and immersed myself in all the scene gossip I'd been missing out on since I'd started spending my nights holing up in bed with Merry, but still. It was not the same. I wanted her there at my side. Everyone kept asking about her anyway, teasing me, asking me where's Merry, we don't want your ugly mug here without your pretty girlfriend. I went to MoMA, but it wasn't the same without Merry at my elbow, telling me what to think about the paintings. I went to the Manhattan Cafe, and the waitress asked where my cute blonde girlfriend was. I went to clubs, but stood by the wall, just watching the kids out on the floor. I felt too shy, on my own. It took having Merry by my side to make me dance.

But despite the weekly sessions with Dylan, my band seemed somehow stalled, and without the distraction of rehearsals to book and gigs to play, I threw all of my worry into Merry. Not that my band were without their problems. On the way home from an experimental gig in a booming industrial cavern underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, Dieter got set upon and had the shit beaten out of him by Nazi Skinheads. The idiot, not understanding how Boroughs worked, had failed to find the subway, and decided to walk home, across the Brooklyn Bridge, then up through the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side, in the mid-90s, could still be a very rough and intimidating place. Though I, having spent my teens years in the City, had a pretty good inbuilt radar for what streets to avoid if I didn't want to get mugged, that was a sense of street smarts that the suburban-raised Dieter clearly lacked.

But Dieter hadn't been mugged, he insisted. He had been crossing Rivington when he was set upon by a gang of skinheads, fresh from smashing up a drug-infested squat they said was polluting the white race.

" _Nazi_ skinheads?" quipped Doyle. "Surely they could have taken one look at your haircut and known you were _on side_."

Dieter glared at him, well, as much as it was possible to glare while holding a wad of tissues to his bloodied face, then spat out another chunk of tooth. "They didn't beat me up for being a Nazi, you fool, they beat me up because they thought I looked homosexual."

"You. Homosexual," I scoffed, shaking my head as I wandered off to the bathroom to fetch more tissue and maybe some antiseptic cream.

"OK, I maaaay have suggested that skinheads are all dying to suck one another's dicks all night because their little shaved heads look so much like circumcised cocks... but that was only after they started hurling such specious 'insults' like _faggot_ ," Dieter shrugged, but the gesture didn't come off quite so nonchalant with his obvious wince.

"Open your mouth," I ordered, returning from the bathroom with a tube of anaesthetic tooth gel. With the blood mostly washed away, it wasn't as bad as it had initially looked, but Dieter still had a huge chunk missing from one of his front upper teeth, and the lower set was jagged. That skinhead's boot had had good aim. "You should really go and see a dentist."

"I can't afford a fucking dentist, I don't have health insurance," Dieter snapped. I cringed, suddenly realising how lucky I was to have a job that covered even routine check-ups. "Christ, is it really bad? I may never open my mouth onstage again if it looks terrible."

"That'll be that day," hooted Doyle, but I shot him an icy glare.

"I don't think it'll be that bad, once it stops bleeding. You really should go and rinse it out with salt water a few more times," I told him. As Dieter shuffled off to the kitchen, still limping slightly, I sat back on the sofa, clutching a handful of bloodied tissues. For fucks sake, Dieter was our secret weapon, a good half of the band's sex appeal. Would our audience still want to fuck Dieter so badly, with a mouth full of tombstone teeth?

Most of the time, Dieter now kept his mouth set in a grim line, his thin lips clamped firmly shut. But a few nights later, at the Lacuna, a girl came up to him at the bar and asked about the scar across his upper lip, and said it gave him a dashing piratical air, before buying him a drink and taking him home with her. Another girl, another night, seemed completely prepared to ignore the teeth, once Dieter had quoted Rupert Brook at her and talked of battle scars. Christ, so even two broken teeth couldn't quash Dieter's appeal to the opposite sex?

"You know, I get it," Doyle theorised, spreading his arms out along our booth as he and I watched a very attractive young woman ask to touch Dieter's teeth, tapping the jagged points timidly, before he raised his eyebrows and caught her fingertips between his lips, like a cat playing with its prey. "Girls love a bit of rough trade, I guess. They always go for the bad boys, don't they."

I frowned into my drink, then wondered if that was the appeal, if I should try to be more _bad_ to be attractive to Merry. Since clearly, you know, the whole _not ringing her back_ thing wasn't working. Maybe Dieter's approach would work better than Doyle's.

Then finally, at the end of two, almost interminably long weeks, I was at last relieved to hear another message on my answering machine. "Hey! Danny! It's me! We're heading home tomorrow. Can't wait to see you. Is it OK if Ely just drops me off at your flat, sparing him the journey out to Queens? Well, either way, I'll probably be there when you get home from work tomorrow. Daw you! Bye!"

I rushed around and cleaned my flat, top to bottom, scrubbed the toilet, changed the sheets, and even bought flowers for her homecoming, arranging the white Easter Lilies  the best I could in an old whisky bottle on the windowsill. Although I had contemplated taking the day off work to stay home and greet her, I decided to save the day I'd booked off for the next week, so we could have a whole day together. And yet, after I climbed the stairs with a bag of groceries and a bottle of wine, I opened the door to an empty flat, albeit one that smelled slightly of lilies.

It was nearly ten o'clock at night when I finally heard the key in the lock, and leapt up to greet her, only to see her dragging her suitcase, then her bass case into the flat. She looked completely shattered.

"Oh, sweetie, you should have rung the doorbell. I'd have come down and helped you with this..."

"Your doorbell is not working, and I didn't have the change for a payphone," she snarled, as if this were my fault.

"Shit. Sorry. Do you want a glass of wine...?" She nodded, and I fetched the rest of the bottle and another glass. "Where have you been?"

"Ely got lost on the Sawmill River Parkway, can you believe it."

"Unfortunately, yes." I kissed her and hugged her, but she lay like a ragdoll in my arms. "So do you want to play me your record now, or wait until tomorrow when you've recovered a bit."

"Yes, yes. Now!" It was astonishing how quickly she revived when her music was at stake. Digging in her luggage for a bit, she produced out a cassette, then she wandered across to the stereo and stuck it on.

I was just jealous at first, they sounded so good, so smooth and professional and perfect, in all the right ways. The dark, sparkling, mysterious tracks I knew so well from dirty basements in the East Village had been honed into magical, shimmering jewels, revealing news depths of beauty. My pride was piqued. Why couldn't Metropolis ever sound this good, recording in shitty basements on Ludlow Street? But then I looked at my exhausted girlfriend, and I felt proud. She had made this. She'd done well. But then the next song started, the long swirling intro filling all the space in the room with unimaginable beauty, and I just felt jealous again. Jealousy, giving way quickly to pride at the sight of her serious face, concentrating on the backbeat. Envious, and then so completely smitten and awestruck that I stood up and went to her, wrapping my arms around her from behind and laying my head against her shoulderblade.

"It makes me feel kinda weird sometimes, how amazing you are. Like, I get so used to you as the pretty girl in my bed, I forget that you're capable of making things like this."

"So you like the tracks?" The insecurity in her voice surprised me.

"I love them. I'm slightly fucking jealous of them, to be honest."

Turning around in my arms, she beamed at me. "They are good, aren't they. It's not just me. Barry took our weird little songs, and made them great."

I shook my head slowly. "Fuck me, this is beyond great; this is awesome."

Despite the dark circles under her eyes, she grinned with mischief. "Alright, I will. Get your clothes off and get upstairs, then."

It was totally weird, fucking her to her own music, the weird echo of her voice in my bed, and her other voice on my stereo, strung out with echo and delay like some ghostly angel. I had never been able to do it - fuck to my own music - because I kept getting distracted by all the imagined or real mistakes and imperfections. And yet Merry just closed her eyes and rolled her head back, and let me bring her off with my tongue, while the music still spilled around us. It was too weird; I didn't really want to do it again, even though I loved the record.

And though yeah, I hadn't lied; I loved the new Down Time material, I thought it was unique and special and amazing, and I would have said that even if I was not boning their bassist. But still, hearing them sounding so good, it made me so much more aware of how little my own band was doing. So I rang Dylan and tried to set up some more rehearsals, this time with the whole band.

 

\----------

 

"What do you _mean_ , you're going to summer school?" I demanded.

"My Mom insisted," Dylan complained. "I've failed two semesters of French now, which means I'll bomb, even if I ace the exam. I've had a conditional acceptance from Brown, but I've got to sort out the French thing. My Mom says it'll be much easier to learn if I go and do an immersive experience in France."

"Brown," I repeated, disbelievingly. Had Doyle not even thought to check if the kid was going to college out of state? Heck, Doyle hadn't even bothered to check if the kid was over 18. "Brown, as in Providence, Rhode Island."

"It's not far," Dylan protested. "It's only 2 or 3 hours away, less if by train. I can come back for gigs."

"And tours? We're going to put a single out this autumn. How are you going to tour when you are starting as a Freshman at Brown?" After all the work I had put into training up this kid, after all the hopes and dreams I had pinned on his featherweight shoulders, I was furious.

"It can't be that hard."

Not that hard. I had had trouble negotiating my Freshman year of university, and playing in a band at the same time, and I had been living in the West fucking Village. "Look, I'm sorry, but I don't think this is going to work out. Good luck to you, but we've got gigs lined up for this summer." Then I put the phone down, and somehow we had gone from having two drummers, back to having none.

I sat slumped in my sofa, rubbing my eyes and feeling very sorry for myself, and wondering what the fuck I was doing with my life, chasing disappearing drummers that never worked out. And then, suddenly I remembered Dick the Stick. Propelling myself towards the hall closet, I dug through my jacket pockets one after one. Had I worn the parka or the wool coat at the Mercury Lounge gig? It hadn't been that cold, and I'd wanted to dress to impress... fuck, I'd had the wool coat dry cleaned after that awful night in the strip club. There was nothing in the pockets but the stub from the cleaner.

My suit jacket. We'd been indoors, and I'd not been wearing my wool coat when I was speaking to Ricardo. Which suit had I worn? I tore the cupboard apart, one by one, until I found the pinstripe suit I'd worn onstage that night. Nothing in either pocket but a guitar pick... wait, no, what was that in the breast pocket? Yes. A business card, with a terrible line drawing of a pair of flaming dice. Dick the Stick, and an address and phone number. In fact, he only lived about 3 blocks away, down at the other end of Rivington Street. Oh please, dear god, let everyone else have been put off by those terrible flaming dice, let him still be available. For once, please god - or universe or whatever it was that answered Merry's prayers - let us catch a fucking break. I picked up the phone and dialled.

A Polish girl answered, and I haltingly asked for Ricardo. She set the phone down, and yelled his name in her adorable little accent, then an American voice came on the line. "Hello?"

"Ricardo, I don't know if you remember me, but this is Daniel from Metropolis?"

"Oh yes, I remember you. What a fucking insane night. I still don't think my missus has entirely forgiven me."

"No, mine, neither," I laughed. "So, how are you set for drumming at the moment?"

"Well, I've been picking up a few weekend gigs with this wedding band, just for the cash, and it's good cash, mind you. But Jesus fucking Christ, I did not move to New York City to play drums on Billy Idol covers for the rest of my life. I am considering packing this lark in. How's Metropolis doing? Did you guys end up signing with Three Square?"

"We're going to do a single with them in the Fall, to see how it works out, but yeah, they're good guys."

"Aw, man, that's exciting! Can't wait to hear how it turns out!"

"You could do more than just hear it. You could, uh... play on it?" I decided to just take the bull by the horns, now that I had a genuine opportunity to offer.

"For real? So the jazz cat didn't work out?"

"The jazz cat did not work out."

"Look, I'm storing my Gretsch kit down in a new studio called Poison Fish, down near City Hall. You guys wanna come round, maybe bash out a few songs? Perhaps Tuesday evening. How's that for you?"

"That's great for us, Dick. I'll see you then." I would force my band to be there, even if I had to hold a fucking gun to Dieter's nazi haircut and frog-march him down to City Hall. It didn't matter if we went to a rehearsal studio downtown, or up at 30th St or the one under the Pink fucking Pony on Ludlow St, they all sounded the same and they all smelled the same - that peculiar mixture of sweat, decay, other people's cigarettes and spilled beer all topped off with the inescapable whiff of desperation.

But after only three songs at Poison Fish, Doyle and I just looked at each other, and Dieter smirked and lit a cigarette, and all three of us knew, that Dick the Stick, despite his stupid name and his dumb trilby, and those terrible flaming dice that were now emblazoned on the breast pocket of his polo shirt, was the drummer that had been born to play with us. He played with the brutal precision of a metronome, intense, but perfectly spare, never a fill or a roll too many, keeping Dieter to the grid like a march instructor. I closed my eyes and threw back my head, and felt the urge to dance, right there in the studio.

This was it, this was fucking it. The backbeat propelling my hips, the sheer roar of it blotting out all of the thoughts in my head, leaving just the shape of the melody, the angular texture, my fingers running up and down the fretboard like cagey spiders. I felt the tension building in the room as four men surged together, interlocking like a machine. Ker-chang, ker-chang went my guitar, durr durr durrrr went the bass, ratatatat went the snare and Doyle's devlish voice broke above it all like an ocean wave hitting the shore. We sounded fucking good. We sounded like a _band_ again. Metropolis - the _real_ Metropolis, not some gang of posers pretending to be Dead Letters or Mexican Summers in front of our East Village friends - was born, that day that Dick Sticciano joined us in the studio and pushed us up to the whole next level.

"So..." opened Doyle sensibly, as we took our beer break, having been stung too many times by drummers we thought were good. "What are your rates?"

"Rates?" Dick blinked like he was confused, pushing his 1950s Buddy Holly specs up his nose. "You think you should pay me? To play music this good? Guys, I'm up for chipping in for beer and rehearsal money. You're gonna have to pay to get _rid_ of me now."

I took them all back to my house, and put on the stereo really loud, blasting Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and we all smoked a bowl and passed round ice cold coronas. (Dick bought a whole case, just to celebrate finding 'his new band'! How amazing was that?) Merry made a huge pot of that amazing veggie curry that was her speciality, and we all ate, sitting draped over every piece of furniture, talking excitedly about how fantastic it would be if we could play a whole tour, up and down the coast from Boston to Tennessee, to support our upcoming single.

As we finished eating, Merry brought the pot of curry through into the living room and went round, topping up everyone's plates and seeing if she could get anyone another another beer. "I'm so pleased this has worked out," I heard her tell Dick as she freshened up his drink. "I can't tell you how long this drummer business has been bugging Daniel."

"Aw, shucks, just glad I could help. I tell you, I had almost given up on the whole music business game. It's good to find a band where I really feel like I belong." Reaching over, he clinked his bottle against mine.

"The feeling is totally mutual, Dick. I am so totally stoked for how good we are sounding! It's... the band I've always wanted," I confessed, grinning. "You are the one drummer we've worked with that has really brought out the best in Dieter's basslines. When you lock tight with Doyle's rhythm guitar like that, so that Dieter can take the counter-melody... holy crap, we sound so good. I'm so excited, like, I always knew we could sound _this_ good, with the right drummer."

"Hang on, hang on, hang on," announced Dieter from across the room, peeling the joint away from his lips. "Do my ears deceive me, or did Daniel just say something... _complimentary_ about this band?"

"Oh my god, give us our guitarist back," giggled Doyle. "Who are you and what have you done with the real Daniel Asheton?"

"Fuck off," I snorted, crawling over to take the joint from Dieter. "I say complimentary things about this band all the time. I have to, I mean, I do promote this band."

"Not to us you don't," Doyle pointed out, somewhat uncharitably.

"I do so,"I protested. "I say nice things to you guys."

"Doyle, you're late, play on the beat, not behind the beat."

"Dieter, you're flat, please retune, this song is in D minor, not in some weird microtonal variant of C sharp..."

"No wait, Doyle, it's your voice that's out of tune. Can you reach the low note, because we can always bring it up a semi-tone. That is, if everyone brought their capos today. Doyle, did you forget your capo again? My god, do I have to do _everything_ in this band."

Dieter and Doyle collapsed laughing on each others' shoulders as I glared at them. "OK, you've had your fun. But I'm not that bad."

"We are used to you being a total perfectionist by now, Dan, but it's still nice to hear a compliment once in a blue moon," Doyle managed to counter between bursts of giggles.

"I'm not a _total_ perfectionist... It's just that someone has to make sure this band is the best it can be," I huffed.

Doyle and Dieter burst into stoned hysterics again. Dick just looked perplexed, as across the room, even my girlfriend started to chuckle. "Danny, I daw you, but you totally are an utter perfectionist. You are the only man I've ever dated who alphabetises his spice rack."

"it was a gift from my sister, OK?" I said. "I mean, if you think _I'm_ a perfectionist, you should meet my family..."

"Oh my god." Doyle suddenly pulled himself up straight, even as Dieter, shaking with laughter, seemed to be sinking into the sofa with the weight of his mirth. With a wicked smirk, Doyle fixed his eye on Merry. "Poor Merry. Can you imagine what it's like, having sex with a perfectionist like our Dan?" He raised his arm as if checking a watch. "Precisely three minutes and twenty seconds of thrusting at one hundred and twenty strokes per minute... surely must be time for the orgasm by now..."

As an odd honking noise like a dying duck emitted from Dieter's chest, Merry stared down Doyle with an expression somewhere between bemusement and veiled hostility. I was so used to Doyle and his constant piss-taking that I shrugged off the insult, but I did wonder if he'd perhaps gone too far with Merry. The conversation in the room had ceased, and the atmosphere had gone weirdly quiet, everyone looking up at Merry to see how she reacted.

Walking over to me, she stood beside me, reaching down and tangling her fingers in my hair with a proprietary air. "Perfect," she announced, very slowly, with that light dancing tone that meant she was grinning naughtily, even though I couldn't see her face. "Sex with a perfectionist like my Danny... is Absolutely. Fucking. _Perfect_."

I couldn't see Doyle's face either, as Merry knelt down to kiss me, blatantly, obviously, super-sensually, sucking my tongue into her mouth like she wanted me there in front of the whole room, but really, I didn't really need to, from the laughter echoing around the room. "Well played, Merry, well played," Doyle conceded, and Merry pulled away, leaving me with a tiny wink that promised pleasures to come when my friends left, as she got up to gather the dirty plates and replenish the beer again.

I stared up at her, my face a helpless grin. Life was fucking good. I had a beautiful and talented girlfriend, who very publicly adored me, and now I had an awesome sounding band. I had the band I had been dreaming about playing with, since I was 16 years old, and first learning to write songs on a battered acoustic.

See, when I wrote songs, alone in my flat, I might only be tinkering around with my guitar, but I always heard this ghost echo of the whole, finished song, exactly how it would sound, the arrangement all fleshed out with the bass and the drums booming along underneath. I knew that I drove my band hard sometimes - maybe too hard - but it was always in search of that _sound_ , that sound I knew that we were capable of making, if only we hit the right tension, the right chemical mix. With Darin, and even with Dylan, I'd always been yearning for something we could never quite hit and I guess sometimes that made me fractious and bad-tempered. Maybe I did give my bandmates a hard time occasionally in the search for perfection, but I knew what we _could_ be capable of; I always heard it in the back of my head. But when the four of us, with Dick, played together for the first time, it struck me, just how easy it was. With the right people, we didn't have to force it, it just happened, that amazing sound that I heard in my head, just when a song first came to me, sitting in my living room tinkering with my guitar, or lying in bed, just before I went to sleep. The Metropolis that was born that day in Poison Fish was the band I had dreamed of being in, my entire life.

Totally inspired by our new sound, I got to work the next day, and pulled down the binder next to Andre's record company binder, the one labelled "Booking agents, venues and theatres, East Coast" and started booking gigs, both all over the Tri-State Area, and out of town. Metropolis were back in business.


	10. A Dream Come True

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The dream finally comes true for Merry: Down Time get signed! But to Windlass Records. Can Merry and Daniel's relationship survive the strain?
> 
> Especially as Daniel uses this new development as leverage to get himself a swish new job as A&R Man for Windlass Records. Can he negotiate the waters of divided loyalties to keep his job, yet make sure that Down Time don't get ripped off by a major label?

Merry was fretting. After the burst of activity of recording, things had gone quiet on the Down Time front. Barry had disappeared again, off to the West Coast to work on the fifteenth album of some massive band, Dead Letters or someone really huge like that, that he couldn't turn down. Elisha had interpreted it as a slight, and was now talking to his lawyer about breaking the contract. "Don't be fucking stupid," I had told him when Merry made me talk to him on the phone. "If you break the contract, he keeps the tapes, and then you're really fucked. Just... hold on. Barry knows what he's doing."

Privately, however, I worried for Merry, even as I assured her that getting signed was always the start of the journey, and never the end. To try and cheer her up, I offered to shop that amazing cassette round the A&R staff at Windlass, but she refused my help, which only made me feel more useless. So eventually I learned to leave her alone and just concentrate on working my own band, making another round of phone calls now that we had Dick on board.

Until, one morning, I was sitting at my desk at work, typing in expense receipts with half my attention, while I listened through the latest set of rehearsal tapes from Poison Fish, with the other half, marvelling at how completely Dick's playing had gelled with us, over only a few short weeks. Then, suddenly, there was a flurry of movement in front of my eyes, the flash of blood red nails, and someone was standing over my desk. Ripping off the headphones, I stared up into the handsome face of Bebe Newcolm, standing in front of my desk, all the way down in accounting. This was three times, now, that she'd made the journey down here. People were going to talk.

"I'm sorry, Ms Newcolm, I haven't got to your expenses just yet, but I'll have them all compiled and the cheques printed by this afternoon. I'll bring yours up to you as soon as it's signed."

"I'm not after an expense cheque." She laid something down in front of me on the desk, and I was shocked to see Merry, Gabe and Elisha peering moodily from between pale, snow covered pine trees, on the cover of a CD. Merry and Gabe looked so beautiful, both of them tall and elegant and winsome, but Elisha looked like a lost child between them.

"I didn't give this to you," I protested. I'd never ever seen the photo; I assumed it had been taken up at the studio, from the pine trees and the snow.

"No you didn't," said Bebe, in a tone that made it seem like she would never forgive me for this not being the case. "But this is your girlfriend, right?" She tapped the plastic of the case above Merry's face.

"That is my girlfriend," I agreed, in a tiny voice, and suddenly remembered introducing them in passing at the Mercury Lounge gig. Across the desk, Andre craned his neck and tried to catch a glimpse, so I sheepishly held up the CD, feeling both oddly proud, like I wanted to show her off, but also deeply embarrassed to be so cornered.

"Wow," said Andre. "That is one attractive woman."

"Yes she is," I squeaked, and Sergei tried to look, but I felt protective of her now, and handed the CD back to Bebe.

"Then I want you to go home, and give her this. She'll trust it more, coming from you, than from a stranger." Producing a card from a hidden pocket, she picked up a pen and scribbled a number on the back. "That's my home phone number on the back, in case she feels more comfortable calling after hours. But you tell her to call any time."

My heart writhed with conflicting emotions, half wanting to call Bebe back and harangue her, demanding to know why the hell she wanted to sign my girlfriend's band, but not my own, and half wanting to ring Merry, at my home, or at her apartment, or wherever the hell she was, and tell her to get on the phone to Bebe Newcolm, now, now, now, before she changed her mind. But I said and did nothing, just turning the card end over end on the desk before me, before finally pocketing it.

"Did she take that CD with her?" asked Sergei plaintively. "I wanted to see Daniel's attractive girlfriend."

"Fuck off," I snapped, with uncharacteristic spite, then instantly relented, realising that I owed Sergei my entire career right now. "I'm sorry, I'm just... this is kind of a surprise."

"Ah, living with a beautiful woman, it always makes you tense," Sergei laughed, and I remembered the stream of Polish on the other end of Dick's phone.

The card burned in my pocket all day, until I finally dragged myself home, wondering if I would find Merry in the apartment, or out at work. My conscience - or something - twinged as I thought of her dayjob. If Windlass signed them, they would immediately put her on a monthly retainer, an allowance that would enable her to quit that awful, awful job. So yes, I desperately wanted her to sign with Windlass. And yet, if she signed to Windlass, and put out a record with her looking that beautiful and cool and mysterious on the cover, it wasn't just dirty old millionaires that didn't stand a chance, who would be lusting after her.

No! Stop it! It would be her decision, and knowing Merry, she would be besides herself with joy.

As I turned the key in my lock, I heard music echoing down the hall, and realised that she was home. Oh good / Oh shit. So I hung up my jacket in the hall closet, and walked down into the main room, still turning the business card end over end in my fingers.

"What's with the long face?" she laughed, working on dance moves on the carpet, playing that _Sweating To The Groovies_ 60s garage-rock tape she did aerobics to, to keep her figure trim. "Did someone die."

"No, it's good news," I told her, and handed her the card straight away, relieved to be absolved of the responsibility of it.

"What is this?" she asked, wiping sweat off her brow with one hand before reading the back first, with a perplexed expression.

"That is the home phone number of Bebe Newcolm, one of the best A&R agents at Windlass Records - in fact, maybe in the whole business."

"You asshole!" she shrieked, and brought her fists unexpectedly down on my chest. I dodged her blows, holding up my hands to shield my face, but she was unexpectedly furious. "You promised you wouldn't interfere... oh, you fucking..."

"I didn't," I snapped. "It was almost certainly Barry - they go way back."

That stopped her in her tracks. "Oh my god, I'm so sorry," she said quickly. I merely shrugged, but moved out of the range of her fists nonetheless. "Good old Barry, he came through."

"I told you to be patient."

Sinking to the sofa, she stared at the card, then stared up at me. "What do I do, Danny? What do I do? Fuck, I should call Gabe and tell him the news, but... fuck. What do I even do? Call her first so I know what she wants? Tell me what to do."

"Call her. You want a record contract, don't you? If you want to be on Windlass Records, Bebe is the person that will make that happen."

"Oh god. This is it." She didn't look relieved, or even happy. She looked panic struck. "What if I can't do it, Danny."

"Don't even fucking pull that shit," I said, sitting down on the sofa next to her and taking her hand, stroking her long, elegant, musician's fingers, playing gently with the calluses on her fingertips. "This is what both of us have wanted, our entire lives. It's what every musician wants, it's what every musician dreams of. This is the moment that you get to quit your stinking dayjob, and stop with all the bullshit that unsigned bands go through. You have a chance to get _paid_ to do what you love more than anything else in life. So don't fuck this up. Just call her."

She looked at me, her eyes edged with tears. "But that's it. Why is it me, and not you? You want this a hundred times more than I do."

I smiled, filled with love for her, for the bold fact of admitting it. I would never have admitted it, had the roles been reversed, though I would have felt it keenly. "Bullshit," I said quietly and reached out to wipe away a small trail of tear that was starting to roll across her cheek.

"I'm not crying because I'm unhappy. I'm crying because... just because I'm overwhelmed." Retrieving her hand from mine, she wiped both eyes carefully. "You're not angry with me?"

"Well... envious, yes." I surprised myself by confessing. "But I will be more angry if you don't do this." That cheered her a bit, as she softly thumped me on the shoulder. "So you get signed, and we don't. It's OK, I'll marry you and just be your pampered trophy husband."

Her face collapsed, her eyes huge and staring, her mouth horror-struck. "Danny, don't. Don't even fucking joke about that."

"Who says I'm joking." I stroked her hair away from her face gently. "I daw you."

"No, no, no, no. Don't do this to me."

"Too soon, I know," I sighed, but I felt so full of love and pride at that moment, that I knew I was completely serious.

"No, no. Not too soon. Not at all." Her face was stricken.

"OK, you don't want to marry me now, at three months, fair enough. But you might want to marry me in a year... maybe two?"

She shook her head slowly, her whole expression crumbling. "Danny, don't do this. OK, I'm not going to pretend I haven't thought about it, to. It's fun, playing house with you. And yeah, I have thought seriously about what happens when you turn 25, if I quit the music industry, too, and marry you and go and live as a housewife in Connecticut or somewhere, but no. It is just a fantasy. It is not going to happen. It can't happen."

"Can't, or won't," I snapped, then felt my face flush. "What is this, you get signed to Windlass Records, and suddenly you're too good for me, thanks for the help, but you're dumped, Danny Boy?"

"No, it's not like that at all," she insisted, desperately. "This doesn't change anything, not like that... but Danny. I can't be the girlfriend you want."

"You already _are_ the girlfriend I want."

"I am not. I am an ex-stripper, mercenary session hack, ball of blind fucking ambition, who is about to get signed and spend the next year or two, or ten, making an album and then touring the world. You freaked out when I was away for two weeks, how on earth are you going to cope with me being away for two years?"

"I did not 'freak out'," I sniffed.

"You bought _flowers_ ," she pointed out.

"So I bought fucking flowers. Fine. Hot damn, I fucking love you, and I bought flowers."

"No. No, no, no, no, no. Not that word."

"No! Not ' _no no no, not that word_ '. That's not fair."

"I can't do this, Danny. I can't be your girlfriend. I can't stay at home and make little curries for your friends. I can't _love_ you, the way you want - the way you think you need - to be loved."

"So don't love me, just _daw_ me."

"I do, Danny, I daw you to bits, but I cannot do this thing you want."

"No! You are not fucking breaking up with me, not like this. I refuse to accept this."

"I'm not trying to break up with you, I'm just trying to be realistic! Do you understand how much this industry changes people?"

"I understand it all too well, Merry. I'm deeper in this than you are."

"You are my best friend in the entire fucking world, Danny. You are more important to me than anyone, except maybe my Mum. And I do not want to put you through what a relationship with you will put you through, over the next couple of years. You need more than I will be able to give you. You need someone full time."

"I don't need someone full time. I need you, full time, part time, or whatever time we can scrape together. I'll quit my band and get a job as a roadie on your tour, if that's what it takes to spend time with you."

"Absolutely not!" she snapped. "See, that's exactly it. You can't do that to your band, to your ambitions, your dreams. You have to be honest to your own destiny."

"So you want to break up with me, so that we can stay friends. How the fuck does that work, Merry? How do I try to 'stay friends' with you, when I can't look at you, and not want to fuck you?"

She shrugged pitifully. "You can still fuck me. I never said we had to stop fucking."

" _What_." I stared at her, trying to get my head around whatever crazy sense she wasn't making. "So you want to stop being my girlfriend, but carry on fucking me." She nodded slowly. "And I suppose you want to just keep coming round my flat three or four days a week, and hanging out in my bed and going to brunch at the Manhattan Cafe and going dancing and watching shitty bands together at the Lacuna Lounge and sitting up all night talking and watching movies."

"I would want to still do all of that, yes. But you wouldn't want to do that, would you? You would want me to be your fucking _girlfriend_."

And with that, I suddenly got it. It was like the 'daw' thing, instead of love? She didn't care if we did the thing, she just didn't want to have to deal with the name for the thing. Slowly, a smile spread across my face, as I cupped her chin in my hands. "So, basically, you just want to carry on doing all the same things, and change absolutely nothing."

"No, we need to change _everything_. Because this thing, that's about to happen to us, it will change everything, and preparing for that change is the only way to survive it."

"Whatever you feel like you need to change, change it. We can use different words, we can use different... whatever. But just keep me in your life, OK? Because I cannot stand the thought of not being in your life." I couldn't keep the edge of desperation out of my voice. I didn't understand her, and at that moment, she just seemed complete unfathomable to me, but I knew I loved her, and I was not prepared to live without her. No matter what the conditions of being with her were.

"OK," she agreed. "Because I can't stand the thought of not having you in my life, either." And then she took my hand in hers, and raised it to her lips and kissed the guitar-playing calluses on my fingertips, one by one. "So should I call Bebe tonight, or is it too late?"

I closed my eyes and felt my head spinning, wanting to delay the moment as long as possible. "I think you should wait, and call her tomorrow, when I'm not here."

"OK." I opened my eyes and despite her puffy eyes and nose tinged red from crying, she was now smirking at me. "Would it still be OK if I slept in your bed?"

"I think it would be OK, so long as you were OK with me trying to shag you."

"I think you can do more than just try, but we have run out of condoms." Her dirty smirk just about slayed me, like how could she still fancy me after having a knock-down drag-out fight with me. And yet fancy me she did. But it wasn't until we had gone up to bed, and rolled around naked until we managed to get each other off through a combination of genitals and fingers and tongues and sheer determination, that I realised the one person she had neglected to think of calling. Elisha.

Nothing changed. She was wrong. I woke up the next morning, and kissed her goodbye, to go to work, and told her I dawed her, and she said she dawed me too, wrapped her arms around my neck and nearly kissed my lips off. Then she said she would buy condoms that evening, so could I please bring home flowers and a bottle of wine or whatever else I thought was appropriate for a seduction, and off I went to work, wondering what on earth all the fuss and heartbreak had been about. She was still my girlfriend in every sense I desired, she just wasn't my ' _girlfriend_ '. I mean, I knew women could be weird, but Merry wasn't just weird, she was like a fucking alien. But still; she was my alien.

 

\----------

 

I had always thought that these things happened instantly, when I was younger and dreaming of signing to a major label and overnight becoming a rock star and making a meeeeeeeeellion dollars. One day you were a mere poseur, a peon, treading the dirty dogshit streets of NYC with everyone else; then the next day, you were a rock star, a golden god, rolling in cash and adulation and travelling everywhere in the back of a limo. But the first thing I had learned from working at Windlass was how long the process of getting signed actually took. And the second thing I learned was that the act of getting signed was never the crowning glory, the end of the long hard slog of work; it was only just the beginning of another level of slog most lazy East Village bands couldn't even imagine.

First there was the long, slow process of drawing up - and then agreeing to - a contract, with legal documents shooting back and forth between Bebe, Barry and the band. Merry brought them home and tried to read them on the sofa, then she would just give up and pass them over to me. I went through them with a red pen and took out the bits I knew Windlass were willing to negotiate on. I could see the process from the other side, with dinners and lawyer fees starting to turn up on the expense account marked "New Business", sub-code "DownTime". And then, finally, after nearly a month of going back and forth, the papers were signed, and the receipts started being assigned to the official "DownTime" account. And from the money that started piling up against that account, I realised that Windlass Records were really serious about this band. They wouldn't be hiring that publicist, that radio plugger and that booking agent, if they didn't think Down Time had the potential to be a serious account - OK, maybe not Dead Letters level million dollar account serious - but they meant business. They were sinking serious cash into this band, cash that would eventually have to be paid for, out of Down Time's sales, before the band ever saw a penny, but they would not be prepared to front that cash unless they had a serious belief that Down Time could - and would - be able to recoup it.

So with that knowledge firmly in my hand, I took the elevator up to the A&R department and told Bebe's secretary that I had an appointment to see her on urgent Down Time business, now.

"What is this about," Bebe demanded when I appeared, and though she was smiling, I could see in her eyes that she was not amused. "Do I need to remind you, Daniel, that you are not actually _in_ Down Time?"

Actually, I had been literally balls-deep _in_ Down Time at about 7:45 that morning, and the memory spurred me to bravado. "But without me, you never would have been able to sign them."

"We would," Bebe snapped, but I shook my head quite confidently. "Alright, it would have taken us substantially longer, but eventually, we would."

"I think you substantially underestimate my importance and my influence within the Down Time camp."

"Within the Wythenshawe camp," Bebe corrected adroitly.

"You know as well as I do that Merry makes the decisions when it comes to that band. And who do you think she comes to, for advice?" I pointed out.

"OK, so what do you want? A finders' fee? A manager's cut? Though I have talked to Elisha this morning, and they are looking for their _own_ management. A professional," she added cattily.

"I want a job in A&R," I heard my voice demand, quite clearly and confidently, sounding completely unlike my normal self. "I did not join Windlass to spend my whole life wasting away in the accounting department."

Bebe pushed her chair back from her desk. Clearly I'd caught her off guard, made a move she did not anticipate, but then she started to laugh. "You've got balls, Asheton. Someone's been building up your confidence, and I admire your newfound ability to play hardball. But what if I refused?"

"Then I go downstairs, jack in my job and go back to Asheton Industrial Accounting, since I might as well get paid properly to be a fucking accountant for the rest of my life." I hadn't realised, until I said it, how much I meant it, and Bebe must have seen the sincerity in my face, because she smiled slowly.

"Alright, Daniel. Go downstairs and get your things. I'll put the paperwork through by the end of the week. You're officially promoted to A&R, but still on a Grade 1 salary. Your title, for the record, will be Personal Assistant to Bebe Newcolm, but I will have you working on every act _except_ Down Time."

"No way." I shook my head. "I'm working on Down Time."

"Conflict of interest, Dan. Can't do it."

"You said I had it in me to be a great A&R guy, at least that's what you told Barry Michaels, oh yes, I spoke to him. Now how am I going to learn unless I learn with the best? I know you're the best A&R in this whole company, and I know from the expense receipts, that Down Time are currently your hottest deal. I'm working on Down Time."

Bebe stared at me for several minutes, until I was almost afraid that I'd blown the whole deal, but then she relented. "Alright, you're working on Down Time. But don't come crying to me when working A&R destroys your relationship with your pretty girlfriend."

"It won't," I insisted petulantly. "We d... love one another." I had almost said daw without thinking.

"Alright, whatever you say. This is your first assignment, then." She dug on her desk and found a file with a well-known brand consultant's logo on it. "The name has got to go. Down Time is never going to fly in this climate, it's too generic. We've come up with a list of replacements. Your job is to get them to pick one."

I flicked my eyes across the list. Saturn Bus-Stop. Topless. Candyland. The Kissing Time. Deltawave. Jesus fucking Christ, these were worse than Dieter's ideas. I knew that none of them were particularly attached to Down Time, except maybe Elisha, but there was no way I could convince Merry to rename her band the fucking Kissing Time. "Can I see the rest of the brand consultants' file, please?"

"Here, take them." Bebe gathered up a sheaf of paper and shoved them into my hands. "You can use the desk just down from my secretary. Get Sherry to clear it off for you."

And I left the room with my head spinning, hardly believing that I'd pulled it off. What if she'd called my bluff? Could I really have gone back and told my father that I'd quit my job? Well, it had worked, that was what was important, I told myself as I paged through the file of terrible band names but quite good publicity suggestions from the brand consultants. Co-ordinated modelling campaigns for high end brands? Oh, Merry would laugh her head off at that. But then the last page caught my eye, and I stopped in my tracks. OK, had Bebe _meant_ to give me this, or had it just been an oversight? Was this some kind of test of my loyalties? No, it didn't look like it, it was just printed on similar heavy bond paper to what the brand consultant used, and had probably been shuffled into the file by accident. Folding both the rogue page, and the list of shitty band names the Down Time were expected to choose from, I stuffed one into each pocket and went downstairs to tell Andre the news.

"No way! Congratulations on your promotion!" exploded Sergei jovially, standing up to thump me on the back. "So I will only see you at gigs now, but this is good with me. You can stand the beers on your new A&R salary." Sergei had started coming to all the Metropolis gigs since Dick had joined the band, and bringing his friends with him. I had had no idea there were that many Polish people scattered across the Lower East Side and Western Brooklyn until they started turning up to our gigs, and the promoters loved them, because oh boy, could partying Poles pack out a bar tab.

Andre was slower with the congratulations, sitting at his desk with a shell-shocked expression until I turned to him expectantly. "Dan the Man... I am... well, I don't know what to say. Obviously, I'm really proud for you, and I wish the best of success to your girlfriend's band. But holy shit, Dan, where the fuck am I going to find another expense receipts clerk as accurate and assiduous as you were?"

I chuckled, and reached over to shake Andre's hand, but Andre pulled me into a bear hug instead. "You mean, you actually thought I was good at my job?"

"We've never had any clerk last more than three months before," Andre shrugged.

"What, you work them so hard they quit?" I joked.

"No, they so shit that Andre fires them," guffawed Sergei.

It wasn't until I was halfway home that I realised that I had no idea how I was going to tell Merry. It was good news, wasn't it? But Merry could be so weird and so territorial, I could only hope that she saw it that way. I tried to just smooth it over anyway, as she was in when I got home, sitting down at my computer with a pair of wire-rimmed granny glasses balanced on her nose, peering at photo contact sheets on the screen. I kissed her sloppily on the top of her head, then headed into the kitchen to open a bottle of wine, and returned bearing two glasses.

"That one looks good," I pointed out, as I deposited the glass next to her elbow, tapping the screen over the best shot. "You and Gabe both look drop dead gorgeous there."

"Yeah, that one's my favourite," she agreed. "But Elisha thinks he looks mentally deficient in it, so we're not going with it. He wants to use that one." She pointed to one at the bottom where Elisha and Gabe were in sharp relief and Elisha actually looked uncharacteristically good, but Merry was turned away, her face half covered by her hair.

"Bebe is never going to let him run with that one. She thinks you're the face of the band." This much, at least, I had gleaned from eavesdropping on phone calls that afternoon.

"Oh god, that's so embarrassing." She made a face and sipped her wine.

"Oh, and you know she wants you to change the name of the band, right?" I broached carefully.

"Christ, that again. Elisha has already said no, but honestly, I don't care. They said they were going to ask a brand consultant to come up with names but... who knows."

"Yeah, I've seen them. Here." I extracted the paper from my pocket and handed it to her.

"Are any of them not completely awful?" she asked. I just made a face. "Topless... you cannot seriously expect me to be in a band called Topless. Oh my god, the Kissing Time, no fucking way. That's worse than Kiss You In Paris..." But as her eye slid down the list, suddenly she stopped and looked up at me. "Danny, how did you get this? And don't tell me Bebe just came down to see you in accounts to get my attention, because I don't believe that now she calls me every day."

So I walked away from her, sat down on the sofa, took a deep breath, and told her a heavily edited version of the story that completely downplayed my bluff and my new-found ability to play hardball, and rather overstated Bebe's confidence in my ability as an A&R guy, since I had, technically, discovered Down Time.

Merry looked at me flatly, as if trying to work out whether to believe me, and I could tell, just from the crinkle over the top of her nose, she was not buying it. "Alright, I went up and asked. I figured it was worth a shot, that it might get me a promotion after a year of that shitty accounting job."

"No," said Merry, with a finality that frightened me.

"What do you mean, no?"

"Danny, no. Please don't do this. I know I can't ask you to turn down such a big promotion, but please. Go back and tell her you can't work on my band. Tell her it's a conflict of interest, that it wouldn't be right, ask to work some other bands. It's going to be far too much of a strain on _us_."

So at least she recognised there was definitely an _us_ to be strained, and she had stopped that _I can't be your girlfriend_ nonsense that she'd started with when they first got signed. "But don't you understand? I did this for _us_. That means when you're off in the studio, when you're disappearing off on tour for years at a time, that means I have a genuine reason to come with you, and your band, and _work_ , and pull my weight, same as Mandy, same as..." The horrified expression in her eyes really bothered me. I had actually thought she might have been excited about it. So I had to pull out my ace in the hole. "...and because I am a mole on the other team, I can stop you from making mistakes like _this_." Pulling out the sheet of paper in my other pocket, I handed it to her.

"I don't understand, what is this?" Merry asked, confused, as her eyes scanned the lines of legalese. "We've already signed a contract, what do we need to sign another one for?"

"It's a publishing contract, with DGI."

Mary looked blank. "Windlass are a wholly owned subsidiary of DGI. Why would we have to sign a publishing contract with them?"

"You don't. That's the point. In fact, signing a publishing contract with DGI is the worst thing you could do. Set up your own BMI company, sign a publishing deal with Chrysalis or Warner Chappell, but whatever you do, do not sign your publishing over to DGI."

"What's the difference. Aren't they all just crooks anyway? Might as well keep it all in-house?" Mary shrugged.

"No. You very specifically do not want to keep it all in house. If you sign your publishing over to DGI, that means all your publishing royalties just go into the pot and become recoupable." I could see she was half getting it, but did not want to patronise her again. "Look, no one ever teaches you this shit, it is the kind of thing you only ever learn from working in the fucking accounting department of a major. You know that there are two major income streams, for a band. You get money from the record company, for every single or album you sell, and then there's publishing money - royalties - that you get from mechanicals, rights, every time they play your song on the radio or use it in the soundtrack of a film or an advert."

"I know that," she snapped. "I was not born yesterday."

"That publishing money, Merry, that is _yours_. That does not belong to DGI. But you know DGI, every time you pay for a studio to record your album, or do a photo shoot, or do a video, or hire a brand consultant to come up with a new band name for you, that money goes on an account. And you have to pay that debt off, with the proceeds from record sales, before you ever see a penny."

She looked at me, horrified, as if suddenly reckoning up the cost of photo shoots, recording studios, brand consultants. "Shit."

"Some bands - even big bands - take a year or two to recoup, even when they're selling well. Most bands never do, so DGI write that off as a loss, to offset taxes on the profits of the bands like U2 and Dead Letters that sell a million CDs with each release. So your publishing money, your own money, that is what keeps you solvent while you work off that debt. So if you sign your _publishing_ money over to DGI..."

"...they start using _our_ royalties to recoup their expense accounts," Merry completed, the whole ugly system dawning on her for the first time.

"Do not sign this contract, no matter what they tell you, or what promises they make about how much easier it will be. Talk to your lawyer. Talk to Barry Michaels - or get him to ask Dead fucking Letters who they use for a publishing company. But do not sign your publishing with DGI."

"Jesus." Merry shivered slightly as she stood up and padded over to the sofa, lying down and putting her head into my lap, wrapping her arms my waist. "I had no idea. I'm... so sorry that I snapped at you. I thought you were just being weird and possessive and neurotic again."

I bristled at that, and though I had been about to put my hand on her head and start stroking her hair reassuringly, I held back. "A thank you would be nice."

Raising her head, she looked at me with big, liquid eyes that made it impossible to stay angry at her. "Thank you. I mean it. I'm sorry for ever doubting you."

"You know, you could have a little more faith in me sometimes."

"I know, and I'm sorry. I'm just so used to... guys get so weird sometimes. You think you're on the same team, and on the same page and then they..." She glanced across the room, to where the photo of Down Time with her hair over her face was still sitting open on the desktop. "They find some way to tear you down, just that little bit. Not enough that you can ever say, hey, _this_ , this thing is sabotage, but just enough that you start wondering."

I sighed deeply, and put my arm around her shoulders, pulling her close and stroking her hair gently. I fucking hated having to take the flack all the time for the stupid, dumb shit that other dudes did, but looking at that photo, I felt Merry's trepidation. "Elisha's a fucking idiot," I told her.

"I know. But can you call him and tell him about the name change thing. I guess if that's your job, now?"

I dug her in the ribs, and she squealed. "So you're the rock star now, and I'm just the help, huh?"

"Ooh, there you go, possessive and neurotic, already..."

"No!" I stopped that right in its tracks, even though I knew it was only a joke. "Look, one of us is going to be a fucking rock star. And if it's you, then it's you. I will do everything in my power to make it happen. One of us is going to the top, OK?"

Merry sat up and looked me in the eye, smiled, and then kissed me, a long, lingering, spine-tingling rock star kiss that might just have been the best kiss of my entire life.


	11. Manufacturing Authenticity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel grows into his new A&R job, and starts to learn more and more about making a band, and breaking a band - in both senses of the word. He's asked to push some decisions he knows will help Merry's band, balancing conflicting notions of 'authenticity' and manufactured pop, and some he fears will destroy them.
> 
> While Merry is Upstate, recording their debut album for Windlass, with super-producer Barry Michaels, Metropolis are cutting an indie single on a miniscule budget. But relations with their label aren't any smoother, for exactly the opposite reasons.
> 
> And finally, as Merry and the boys prepare to go to the UK for their first tour, she and Daniel contemplate taking their relationship to the next level, and moving in together.
> 
> content warning: transphobic language

I took on the task of managing Elisha and the name-change. Figuring this was something that was better handled in person than over the phone, I told Sherry I was going to be out of the office for the rest of the afternoon, then rang Elisha and invited him for a celebratory drink at the Lacuna.

The doors had only been open an hour, but the regulars were already dispersed around their usual haunts. Fab and Al manned one side of the foosball table, while Phil and Jeremy from the Rocket Pops smoked furiously and ably re-directed balls back at them between drags.

Jeremy looked up when we walked in, and whistled appreciatively at my companion. "Elisha Diamond! I heard you guys got signed." So news travelled quickly through the Lower East Side.

"To Windlass Records, yes," Elisha countered, and I would have put more pride into this assertion, but Elisha seemed cautious, even guarded. "Are you guys still on Three Square?"

"Nope," hooted Jeremy. "Haven't you heard? We're doing our next single with Jail Bait. English label, very cool."

As if I needed to be told who Jail Bait were. The legendary Nothings had released their albums on Jail Bait, way back in the 80s, and they'd carried on releasing unspeakably cool bands right up through my youth. And now, apparently, Geoff from Jail Bait had flown over to New York, and been so impressed by the Rocket Pops that he'd signed them straight off? There was no justice in the world. I tried to imagine Jeremy and Phil on the same label as The Nothings, and I just couldn't do it. It was not fair. But still, to show any sort of envy would blow my cool, so I just pretended to nod appreciatively, even as I simmered inside.

"Congratulations," I said quietly and went up to the bar to order a round as Elisha and Jeremy compared notes on their deals. Charlene poured a couple of beers for us, and I looked around the bar for a place we could quietly talk.

One side of the front window was already taken by a rough-looking dude in a flannel shirt - oh please, let the grunge hordes have not discovered our hangout just yet - scribbling in a notebook. The other side held a girl sketching away at what looked like comics, the table already littered with empty wine glasses and crumpled up pieces of paper. The bar was much noisier now, as Kate and Beth from the Charms had blown in, all fake fur coats and those very very short babydoll dresses that had probably started life as lingerie some time in the 60s. They joined the Rocket Pops at the foosball table, looking totally wired and a little bit drugged out, talking at lightning speed, babbling excitedly about some interview with a big British journalist who had flown over to do a feature on them. Lucky bastards; the perks of being signed, apparently.

I craned my neck as I sipped the head off my beer, wondering if we could poach the other end of one of the booths, but Kate and Jeremy now appeared to be making out on the only spare bench. Wow, were they an item now? None of the Charms ever bothered dating dudes in unsigned bands, a fact that infuriated Dieter no end. Oh christ, don't look over, he's hitched up Kate Gordon's dress and it looks like Dieter is right on one respect, that girl does not _ever_ wear any knickers. Look away, look away quickly... wow, so she is a natural blonde, huh. As I tried not to stare, Beth pulled out a compact filled with white powder that didn't look like it was intended to go _on_ her face, and though she politely offered it to me, I shook my head. Work before pleasure; I needed to stay sharp and those girls' drugs looked _strong_ if they were that wasted halfway through the afternoon.

"Can we go in the back room for a bit?" I asked Charlene, who shrugged and tossed me the keys.

"Just lock up behind you if you don't want to be disturbed," she told me. "We won't open up back there until 8." I lead Elisha through and locked the door behind us, relieved to shut out the noise of our friends' revelry. The back room always looked so weird during daylight, much smaller than it seemed at night, the red velvet curtains at the stage end looking faded and dusty instead of glamourous, the floor scratched and the sofas threadbare and drink-stained. What magic a little bit of low lighting and a lot of drunkenness could work.

"Right, so let's get down to business," I said, as I pulled two sofas away from the wall to face one another, so we could chat more comfortably. "First off, Merry played me your demo, and hot damn, you guys are sounding absolutely fucking amazing. I knew you guys were good, but I am seriously super-impressed by how your songs came along." It was something I'd learned from Merry; always best to start with flattery, before tackling a tricky topic.

As Elisha sat down, he kind of crumpled up his shoulders and tilted his head to one side, smiling like a schoolboy embarrassed to have won first prize. "Oh, that's so kind of you!" A pause, as insecurity flickered across his face. "But you really think so? You're not just saying that, because of Merry?"

"Man, your song-writing is totally next-level," I assured him. "And that lush, full-bodied production that Barry has gone for, it so suits your style, it really brings out the best in your tunes. I mean, your tunesmithery is so classic your songs would sound good on a barrel organ, but this tape, man, I can't even tell you how great it sounds. I am so into it; it is next fucking level."

After years of managing Dieter and Doyle and their conflicting egos, managing Elisha was actually easy by comparison. I'd sussed out Elisha's character quite quickly - now Elisha really _was_ neurotic and insecure, and needed constant reassurance that his songs were as good as everyone said they were, and his photos were fine, and his look worked, and yes, the recordings had been really, spine-tinglingly amazing, and no, Bebe was not trying to rip him off, well, not really, apart from the publishing thing, but all record companies tried that kind of shit, it was just a question of getting wise to them. And really, I told him in quiet confidence, like I hadn't even cleared this meeting in advance, I was absolutely the best placed person to get wise to that to that kind of shit, and steer him through it. 

"But you're working for Windlass, really," Elisha probed, still suspicious, no matter how much I massaged his ego. "Aren't you on their side?"

"I'm A&R," I told him, with plausible conviction. "Artists and Reppetoire. That means I'm on the artist's side. Always. Especially when that artist involves my girlfriend."

Mentioning Merry was a mistake. Doubt flooded Elisha's face, and for a minute, I thought I'd lost him. I made my face as neutral as possible, aiming for blandly friendly and on-side. But his doubt solidified and turned into a definite question. "So what do you think about the name change, then, Dan?"

Digging in my pocket, I pulled out the suggested list, and placed it on a table between us, pinning down each end with one of our beers to stop it from folding back on itself. "Are you really that attached to the name?"

"Weellll..." hedged Elisha, then shrugged. "OK, not really, no. It was always kind of a compromise? But I just feel like... if we start making compromises with our record company here, where's it gonna end? If they start by making us change our name, our clothes, our look... how soon do they start making us change our music?"

"They don't want you to change the music," I told him. "Bebe loves the material, she'd be a fool not to. But what about these names? Are there any you don't think totally suck?"

Elisha picked up the piece of paper and perused it as he sipped his beer. "I kinda like Deltawave. It sounds... science-y."

"Deltawave's good," I agreed. "Science-y is a good association for you guys." I leaned in closer, as if making a confession. "Down Time always struck me as kinda... I dunno, kinda yuppie, the kinda thing an office worker would say? You guys are a lot more... science-y than that. I'd check out a Deltawave, before I'd check out a Down Time."

"What does it mean?"

For that, I had actually come prepared, as Merry had gone and looked it up in an encyclopaedia. "It's a deep sleep brain state. Like, deeper than dreaming."

"Deeper than dreaming." Elisha's eyes lit up, and I could tell he was halfway to agreeing if I didn't screw this one up. "I like that. That suits us." But abruptly his face fell, and he shook his head as he replaced paper and beer on the table. "I don't know, Dan..."

"What are you afraid of, if you change the name?" I probed.

"Changing the name... it feels..." Elisha grasped for words. "It feels false, it feels manufactured."

"What do you mean, manufactured?" Actually, I knew exactly what he meant, but I wanted to hear him put his fears into words. "All bands are manufactured. You manufactured Down Time. I manufactured Metropolis. It's not manufacture that's bad, it's the artistry of the person doing the manufacturing that counts."

"No, I don't mean like that," Elisha countered. "You know... prefabricated. Like Bebe Newcolm already has in her mind the band, the image, the name that she wants to sell next, and she's just going to slot us into that prefabricated niche, because we have the right... I dunno, _look_ or something."

"I think that's the _last_ thing that Bebe wants to do." I knew some record companies worked like that, but Windlass really wasn't one of them. Like Barry Michaels, they preferred to hone what was already there. "And even if she did, that doesn't make _manufacture_ bad, on an image level. The Sex Pistols were manufactured, by Malcolm McLaren. The Ramones were manufactured. So were the Ronettes. Didn't stop any of them from making totally classic, amazing music."

Elisha carried on as if he hadn't even heard me. "I have been working on this band for half my life. I have crafted every note we play, at the cost of blood, and sweat and tears. I don't want some... record company executive coming along and telling me that a brand consultant has decided to just rip the heart out of it. Our music is not prefabricated or manufactured or designed by committee, our entire aesthetic is... artisanal."

Artisanal. I knew exactly how much they were paying per day for Barry's state of the art recording studio in Upstate New York, and this sounded, well, a teeny bit hollow. But realising I was falling behind on the drinking, I picked up my beer and took a sip. 

"It's _just_ the name, Elisha." At the sound of his own name, he stopped ranting and looked up at me, still wary, but listening. I had to remember that trick for future reference. "Lots of bands change their name when they get signed. Hell, we changed our name because Bebe said Metropolis was a better name than Kiss Me In Paris, and you know what? She was totally right." I could see from the flicker in his eyes that he agreed with her, and carried on. "Everyone knows the story of how Dead Letters changed their name from Leaves of Grass on Sol Glass's advice. Even..." I looked about and saw the copy of the NME sticking out of the top of Elisha's bag. "Even Slur changed their name when they got signed."

"Slur changed their name?" Elisha seemed surprised by this. "What were they called before?"

"They were called Arthur. Isn't that a terrible name?"

"That is a terrible name." Elisha nodded and slurped his beer.

"Grub Records said it sounded like a hairdresser. Arthur. So they gave Damon Adams a list of names, and Arthur became Slur. Slur are now a world class band. I don't think Arthur would have made it any further than The Good Mixer, to be honest." So there were times when an encyclopaedic knowledge of pop history was a good thing, I guess.

"Deltawave," said Elisha, turning over the phrase in his mouth, as if feeling it out. "OK, I guess we could be Deltawave. I'll ring Merry and Gabe and tell them that we're Deltawave now."

I bought Elisha another beer, locking up as we moved back through into the front bar to party with what was left of the gaggle of Rocket Pops and Charms, though Kate Gordon and her extravagant bush seemed to have gone home with Jeremy Kane. Everyone was super-polite and super-supportive to our faces, Fab and Al going out of their way to ingratiate themselves with Elisha now, but it still seemed weird. Competitive in a way I wasn't sure I liked.

The next day, I went back to work and told Bebe that the ruffled feathers had been smoothed over, and Down Time were now Deltawave. Bebe was pleased, and said that her confidence wasn't at all misplaced, that I definitely had it in me to be a really skilful A&R. Well, maybe. Except it seemed to me that it had been my confidence more than hers that got me here.

I did not, however, tell Dieter or Doyle, or any of the Lacuna Lounge crew about my new role as an A&R, just muttering something about a promotion at work that brought better hours and a more flexible schedule, and with that, I surprised myself even more than bluffing my way into the job in the first place. Because the whole time I had been waiting and hoping for a promotion to the A&R department, I had been fantasising about how good it would feel to parade around the Lower East Side telling all of my friends what a hot shot I was, and what a big deal I was at Windlass Records. And yet, now it had happened, the last thing I wanted to do was tell anyone. I had seen the suspicious way that Jeremy and Elisha had started to view one another, and I didn't want any of the others to treat _me_ that way. And really, because that whole thing, being just one of the boys in the endless bands, especially one that was viewed as vaguely _hopeless_ in the scene, it gave me the freedom to check out other bands and keep my ear to the ground without people trying to bullshit me all the time. Like I'd seen scenesters come over to Phil Rocket Pop or Elisha Diamond and try to _bullshit_ them, now they were perceived as having some tiny modicum of power or influence.

So when a hot new band appeared in town, I was still always the first to know, and the first to see them, and the first to start shopping their demo CD around to the senior A&Rs. And even when they didn't sign to Windlass, and Bebe or Harvey passed them on to a colleague in LA where they got signed to another DGI subsidiary, well, that was the kind of thing that got you _noticed_ in the A &R Department. People were starting to ask my opinion on things, and though I kept my contacts jealously to myself, and certainly didn't tell anyone how it was Charlene that usually tipped me off, if I suggested people head down to CBGB's to check out this hot new band from New Zealand who were passing through town, people went.

And finally, after another month of faffing around, and overruns with Barry Michaels finishing the Dead Letters record in LA, the Down Time, or rather, Deltawave, were set to head upstate to record in Barry's Catskills Mansions retreat. It was well into summer by now, and I was jealous of Merry getting to leave town and go up to the mountains to escape the heat. Except, when I suggested that I go along with her for at least part of the sessions, I was told no, in no uncertain terms, and not even by Merry, who actually appeared to quite want me there, but by Barry.

"No record company people in the studio. That's just how I roll," Barry insisted.

"But Danny's hardly record company, he's practically one of us," Merry pestered, but Barry stood firm.

"I cannot work with A&R breathing down my neck. Sorry, Dan, it's nothing personal, but I don't even allow Bebe in the studio when I'm working. It makes me nervous, and if I'm nervous, the band are uncomfortable, and I'm just not doing it. I'm not setting that precedent, because if I do it for Down T... Deltawave, then I have to do it for every other one of Bebe's bands, and just.. no. Most definitely not."

"I can't just not see Merry for three months," I protested, casting a desperate glance at Merry, and Barry relented slightly.

"She gets weekends off for good behaviour if they're working well. Come up and stay at the Catskill Inn and I'll send her off to you on a weekend pass."

And so Merry disappeared, leaving my apartment frighteningly quiet and almost lonely. Dick started coming round in the evenings, and the two of us drank frothy Polish beer and kicked songs around on acoustic guitar and bongo drums - it sounds absurd, and we must have looked like fools, but even Dieter had to admit that the new material was really fucking good. Merry had been challenging me, expanding my horizons, getting me to listen to stuff that wasn't just Post-Punk bands, weird newer stuff like My Bloody Valentine and Spacemen 3, and our new material grew by leaps and bounds. But it was actually a good exercise, trying new things out acoustically, because I knew that if the songs worked on an acoustic guitar and bongos, they would sound even better with the full band.

And Doyle's lyrics, they were getting better, more daring, more abstract and less like an English Major drop-out's scratchings in the margins of Brautigan books. Doyle went to France for three weeks with his girlfriend, and came back tanned and inspired. The band's sound and material were picking up steam exponentially, as if now I'd finally decided to jack it in and do A&R instead, they were trying to woo me back. Doyle had sold a couple of the poems he wrote in France to a well-reputed poetry magazine and had been shocked at how little they paid. So he decided perhaps being a rock'n'roll singer really was a better career, and Effie was pleased with the decision, buying him sharp new clothes to wear onstage.

Without Merry around to distract me, I rehearsed 3, sometimes 4 nights a week, half in my living room on acoustic guitars and half at the studio where Doyle worked. Doyle had made friends with a guy who owned another studio on one of the floors above, and this one was a recording studio. Soon we were negotiating to record a 4-track EP on mates rates, since Three Square hadn't actually specified how short their "single" was supposed to be. It felt weird, and somehow underhanded that there I was, recording an EP on the sly, on weeknights, while Merry was upstate in a lush, fully appointed residential studio. The other boys all worked part time and odd hours, so staying up mixing until 2am was no big deal to them, but I was constantly shattered. So the first time I took the bus up to Catskill and fell asleep in my room at about 8pm, intending to ring Merry in the morning, I awoke at 2pm to the bone-shuddering sound of Merry pounding on the door to wake me up.

Merry was blossoming; I had never seen her so happy. Although I had thought that Barry was supposed to be a taskmaster, he had a strict routine that he refused to deviate from. A planning session in the morning at breakfast, then 3 hours recording in the morning, two hours for lunch, then a 5 hour block until dinner. And that was it. No overtime, no all-night sessions, just a regular, almost 9 to 5, 8 hour day. The rest of the time, the band rehearsed a bit, and worked on songwriting, but mostly they were encouraged to to relax, to walk around the grounds and even ride horses on the trails. Mandy had brought her laptop - though I was piqued as hell to find that Mandy was allowed when I wasn't - and in the evenings they worked on new projections to go with the songs. Gabe had taken up fishing, and often rose several hours before breakfast to wade into the mountain streams, while Merry had obtained a box of watercolours and started teaching herself to paint landscapes.

I tried to imagine Metropolis in a recording studio like that, then remembered Doyle and Dieter and their all-night sessions, cigarette-ash dripping on the carpet, beer spilled over the amps, and I just couldn't picture it. Perhaps it was good that it was Merry's band that had been signed, and not mine.

But still, after 2 days with Merry, wandering about the small hippie town, holding hands as we peered into second hand bookshop windows, eating at the vegan whole foods cafe with the rainbow mushroom painted in the window, I had a sudden pang of missing her so badly that I didn't want to let her go after we made love for the last time on Sunday evening.

"Don't you get lonely up at the studio without me?" I wheedled, holding onto her more tightly, resting my chin on her bare shoulder and staring into her eyes with the intensity of a child frightened of losing his beloved stuffed animal. "If it's just you and three blokes, all alone in the woods..."

"Four blokes," Merry corrected, playing gently with my hand resting on her belly, twisting my Asheton signet ring round and round. "Don't forget Barry's engineer, Ken - oh, but there's Cindy up at the house if I ever get the craving for girly chat and feminine companionship."

"Cindy?"

"Cindy Birdweather. Barry's wife. She cooks us dinner, and keeps the main house all cosy."

"Wait," I stuttered. Half of me prickled with annoyance that Barry's partner was allowed up at the studio, while I was forbidden. It still annoyed me about Mandy, so Barry's wife just added more fuel to my fire. Then something else struck me. "But Barry's gay," I protested.

Merry shrugged lightly, and lowered her voice. "Well... It's complicated. Cindy told me she was born a guy."

" _What_?" I felt my whole conception of reality slipping out from underneath me.

"Did you never notice?" Merry laughed, looking at me as if I was completely stupid. "All the _girls_ in the Girls! Girls! video?"

I cast my mind back, remembering amateurish looking footage of women dancing on the streets of the West Village, then mentally checked myself to make sure that I had never, ever, even accidentally, fancied Cindy Birdweather. "You mean they were _all_ trannies?"

Mary frowned and made a severe face. "We don't use that word. That's an ugly, hateful word. Cindy is a woman."

"But she... he... it?" I sputtered, panicking.

" _She_ ," Mary repeated firmly, and I could tell from that flash in her eye that she was not going to back down on this. "She's more of a woman than I am. In fact, Cindy jokes that when I'm around Gabe and Elisha too much, I'm practically a bloke." Unhooking my arm from around her waist, she climbed out of bed and walked towards the bathroom.

As I watched the bare backs of her long legs, her muscular thighs, I was filled suddenly with a sense of panic. "You're not _really_ a bloke, are you? You are all girl, right?"

She turned and laughed at me, her breasts jiggling in a fleshy way that reassured me slightly. "Would it matter?"

"Yes! Of course it would matter."

"Why?" She shrugged again.

"Because I'm not gay, alright?" I huffed, raising myself up on one elbow, feeling on the night-table for my watch. I still had half an hour before the last bus back to New York left from outside the gas station.

Merry padded back towards the bed and bent down to kiss me gently on the top of my head. "You are the gayest boy-thing I've ever dated. And I mean that as a compliment." Then in a flash, she had disappeared into the bathroom, without even letting me pull her back down for another kiss.

But I fussed and I fretted and complained about not being let in the studio so much that the next weekend, Merry took the bus back down to NYC on Friday evening. She claimed this was a major concession to me, but secretly, I thought that really, she missed New York City more than she missed me, missed decent bagels and record shops and Pearl Paint, where she bought new brushes and paper for her watercolours. But this time it was my turn to disappoint her, sniffing that I had to go into my own studio on Saturday evening to finish the overdubs on our own EP.

"Oh, let me come with you. I haven't seen the boys in ages," Merry wheedled, but I felt like giving her a taste of her own medicine.

"Can't. We have a no girlfriends in the studio rule, ourselves."

"Oh come on, I'm not a _girlfriend_ girl. I can help you. I can do backing vocals on The Sailor To The Sea. Doyle always wanted me to."

I pouted at her, but knew that I was going to give in. I always gave in, wherever Merry was concerned. "You're not allowed to do guest appearances on other artists' records without express written permission from Windlass Records. Have you forgotten that contract you signed?''

Merry grinned and batted her eyelashes at me. "Well, it's a good thing my A&R guy is standing _right here_."

She did the backing vocals, doubling the synthesised string section that Dieter had overdubbed, way up high, sounding more like a theremin than a woman. And with her last magic touch, the EP clicked into shape, a perfect document of the band that had been Metropolis, to live on after me, once I married Merry and just went to work in A&R for the rest of my life.

That is, if I could ever pin Three Square down on releasing the damn record. Charlie was being fucking weird, since we'd had an odd, stilted argument that I hadn't even realised was an argument until the thing blew up in my face. It had started as a discussion about Dead Letters, which escalated quickly into an argument about 'selling out' as Charlie started criticising Dead Letters not just for signing to a major label, but for hanging out with "professional celebrities" like Jezebel and Madonna. I answered without thinking, saying that actually I really quite liked Jezebel's latest album, and Madonna... well, our band had originally been named after a phrase in a Madonna song! We all loved Madonna.

Charlie had gone really quiet for a couple of days, and when I rang him, I was not prepared for the rant in my eardrum. "How can you listen to shit like Jezebel and Madonna?" Charlie raged. "I thought you guys were a proper band, into proper music, not that prefabricated shit. Like, I can't even listen to a Jezebel record, it just slides off my eardrum. There's no musicianship, there's no craft. It's as highly tooled and machine-engineered as a fucking Lexus. It's all just showy production tricks, and it's all the Cult of Personality. It's not music, it's all fucking marketing."

"And what, exactly, does _Marketing_ sound like?" I asked, trying to be diplomatic, but something about the conversation was really getting my back up. It was like Elisha, all over again.

"I... I can't tell you, but I know it when I hear it, and that's what the new Dead Letters album sounds like to me. It's all style, no substance. It's produced so slick, I physically can't even listen to it," Charlie persisted stubbornly. "It just slides off my eardrums like cheap fucking bubblegum."

I resisted the urge to point out that actually, cheap bubblegum was really quite sticky, and did he have any idea what it did to the soles of hand-tooled Italian shoes? Because hot damn, let me tell you, that shit did not just slide off.  "You don't think that production is an artform as much as songwriting is? You don't think that people like Phil Spector and Pete Waterman and Barry Michaels are, also, artists?"

"Look, I gotta go," snapped Charlie. "I got _real_ records to release, not that pop trash."

And I didn't hear from him for another month. It was so unfair. With Dick onboard, the band was sounding better than it ever had, and yet now I was working in A&R, and starting to understand how best to launch a band - any band, but especially my own - no one wanted to touch us.

The months passed quickly, as the momentum built behind Deltawave's marketing plan. I was learning so much from Bebe Newcolm that I could hardly believe I was really the same naive little boy who had walked into A&R and demanded a job. There were echelons within echelons, and there were industry secrets and then there were _industry secrets_. I learned how to commission a two hundred thousand dollar video, and I learned who to call to cater a world tour on four different continents. And I learned that Bebe had heard the rough mixes of the album so far, and wanted to push Merry not just as the face of the band, but as the lead singer, as well.

When she called me into the listening room for my opinion on the mooted single - and Jesus, if Merry thought my five grand stereo was fancy, she should see the Windlass Listening room - in my head, I secretly agreed. Elisha had had singing lessons, and his voice was definitely stronger than it had been at the early gigs. But when Bebe played me a second mix, with Elisha pushed down to backing vocals, and Merry double-tracked in the foreground, Christ, yes, the song took on a whole new dimension when sung by a woman. The track was called _Shame_ , and when Elisha sang it, he sang it with such a derisive sneer in his voice, that it was clear he was putting down the object of shame. But when Merry sang, she sang with such tremulous ambiguity that you felt for her, you resonated with the impression that the shame wasn't so much yours as it was hers, that she was asking forgiveness for. It was just a whole different song, a _better_ song, when Mary sung it.

"Well, you've got the magic touch, when it comes to handling Elisha," Bebe told me. "You should be the one to push it."

"No. No way," I baulked.

Bebe glared at me. "I knew this was a bad idea. You're afraid of compromising your relationship with your girlfriend."

"No, I'm afraid of destroying Merry's relationship with her _band_. I can't make this call, Bebe; he'd walk if he thought I was on her side, not his. I can maybe play good cop if you want to push being bad cop, but I can not make this call."

"Don't be stupid, there's no way that Elisha would walk away from his recording contract at this stage of the game, over switching a lead vocal from him to his bassist," Bebe fussed.

"You don't know Elisha. I do," I warned, and I hoped to god Bebe took note of it.

So Bebe handled it, and though she finessed it quite well, considering, it still drove a fracture right through the heart of the band. The last weekend that I took the bus up to Catskill to visit Merry, I found her distracted and unhappy, such a change from the delighted girl of early summer.

"They've been making me re-cut the lead vocal on the single," Merry told me tearfully at the Rainbow Mushroom cafe, which had become our regular haunt when I was in town.

"I know," I finally confessed, after her weighty look grew too much to bear. No matter what I said next, it would come off badly. What should I tell her? That I agreed with the decision, that I thought she should sing on that track? Or should I tell her that I'd fought for Elisha, to keep the band's unity and equanimity?

"You tried to talk her out of it, didn't you?" she asked. I nodded slowly; I was no good at lying to her. She smiled gratefully and squeezed my hand under the table. "They want us to model, you know. Bebe's really pushing it, says it will help visibility. And I could do with the money, to be honest. I said I'd do it if the others did it, and Gabe, at least, is keen on it, bless him, but Elisha thinks it's one more plot to oust him in my favour."

"If you want to model, I can call my sister," I offered, ignoring the bulk of her complaint. "She works at Vogue, knows all the big agencies. She set Dieter up with his first agent. She will make sure you get someone super-good who won't steer you wrong."

"You are the best, Danny." She smiled bravely. "You know that, right?"

So I booked dinner, and introduced Merry to my sister Pricilla, with a meaningful phone conversation beforehand, and quite serious intimations that Merry might be The One, so she needed special care and attention. So Pricilla was primed to meet Merry, but really they got on just fine, even without me, talking about clothes and style and the difference between London Fashion Week, which Pricilla had just been to, versus the big New York and Paris shows. And by the end of dinner, Merry had squeezed my hand under the table, and when she got up to check her pager, my sister leaned over and hugged me and whispered "You are actually in love. It suits you." And Merry and Pricilla exchanged business cards, and Pricilla said she knew the perfect agent to handle her and Gabe, and would be in touch.

 

\----------

 

But Merry was still not quite back to normal when she returned from Upstate for the final time. She'd had her hair tinted by Cindy Birdweather, lightened from the colour of butter to the colour of flax, and she looked fantastic with that silver mane. But despite her best efforts at maintaining the peace, Elisha was still being weird, and blaming her for the vocal swap on the single. And losing Elisha's good graces had somehow sapped her confidence, and left her at a bit of a loose end. Elisha and Barry had already flown over to England, to master the record at The Townhouse in West London, but Merry, sick of the band politics, had chosen to spend the week in New York with me, instead. Since the advance copies of the single had tested better in Europe, the whole band were going to relocate for the month of September, basing themselves in London to deal with the press. They were going to try to break the record in England first, before building momentum in the States.

"Test better," said Merry. "How can a single test better? They make us sound like some kind of disease. _Studies show, European populations show less resistance to the Deltawave virus_..."

"No, no, they do actual test pressings, white labels and things." I was proud of this knowledge, I'd worked with Windlass's Promotion department on the campaign. "We send them out to DJs, club promoters, people with an established audience."

"Wait, so we haven't even finished recording the album yet, but people are playing our records already in clubs?" Merry looked slightly outraged.

"No, no, it's fine. We do this all the time. We work out deals with well-known DJs, especially in Europe. People go to those clubs because they know they will hear the newest, freshest sounds, months before the records hit the shops. And in return, we get the DJs to fill out response cards, saying how people liked the track, whether they danced, or whatever."

Merry's face registered her disbelief. "So you're telling me that you get back, like... report cards, from John Peel or Pete Tong or whoever. A for Attitude, E for Effort."

"John Peel's response forms are legendary! The man's hilarious." I affected a deep, mellifluous English accent with a slight nasal burr. "'I play this record at parties, every week. It's fantastic... for getting people the hell out of my living room to go home! Never trouble me with this tripe again!'"

At that, Merry started to laugh. "Oh, god, I hope he liked it better than that. I suppose I'm proud, then, that they like us better in England."

"So you're finally going home," I teased her.

That got a smile. "I know, isn't it great? Maybe I'll finally meet Graham Cooper." I smiled wryly and kissed the tip of her nose. "Come on, aren't you just a little bit jealous?"

But then I paused, and thought about it, and decided I could afford to be magnanimous. "You know, if you actually meet Graham Cooper, at the Good Mixer or wherever, I actually want you to forget about me for the evening, and do whatever your little heart pleases. I am willing to make an exception, but only for Graham Cooper, because I know you love him so much."

She laughed and smacked me gently on the cheek and said "As if" but then she broke into giggles again, and she looked so adorable when she was fangirling that I didn't really mind. Heck, if I met Graham Cooper at the Good Mixer, I might be willing to make an exception to my own heterosexuality for the evening. "What about you, though? Do you want a free pass on anyone?"

I thought about it for a minute. "Well, OK. I get to make an exception for... Kim Deal from The Pixies? No, wait. Jeanette Flores from Mexican Summers."

"Deal, for Deal," she quipped. "But you're going to have to fight Jorge from Mexican Summers for Jeanette, not me." She laughed, and then she kissed me.

 

\----------

 

Merry was giving up her apartment in Queens, as it made no sense for her to keep paying the rent there when she was going to be in Europe for a month, and then on tour for the next god knows how long. So she was going to put half her stuff into storage up at her mother's house in Western Massachusetts, and leave the rest of her things at my place. For me, it felt like a definitive decision, a declaration of our couplehood in a way that was permanent, that despite her leaving on tour, we were expecting this thing to last. It was a statement. We were _moving in together_.

"I'm not moving in with you, though, not really," she had tried to protest, even as she was packing some things into sturdy boxes to go to Williamstown and some things into a suitcase to go to my apartment.

"I know," I reassured her, knowing better than to contradict her when she had decided to put one label on a thing rather than another. It didn't matter what she called it, so long as she was moving her things and herself into my apartment. "But think of this place as your home; you are welcome to treat it as your home, whenever you need to. For the odd weekend you come back to New York." I paused as she fell oddly silent. "You will be coming back to New York for the odd weekend, right?"

"I don't know." Her voice sounded very quiet and slightly scared when she finally answered.

"Well, look. It's fine. I can grab a cheap flight and get out to London whenever. Hell, that's part of my job description as your A&R. It will be fine."

She  dropped her eyes and stared down at the half-filled suitcase on the floor. "I don't know. It just feels weird. When my Mum and I first moved to America, I hated it so much that for the first year or two, I kept a suitcase packed, at all times, just in case someone came and told me that I could get on a plane and go home." She paused. "It took me ages to realise that no, it was permanent. We weren't going back. And now I'm... well, it just feels weird that I'm going back 'home' but leaving a suitcase here, just in case."

"Was it that terrible, moving to the States?" I asked quietly, though really, I didn't need to ask, I already knew the answer. There was a reason that when we reminisced about the hazy days of childhood, we shared memories of The Magic Roundabout and Blue Peter and the London Science Museum.

"Did you like America when you first got here?" Her eyes showed she already knew the answer, from experience.

"I don't know." I tried to put a brave face on it, to contradict her. "Being in New York was a bit like being on television. Well, like watching television with the sound and the colour and everything turned on high. It was disorienting, but..."

"But...?" she asked, cocking her head.

"But lonely," I confessed.

She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. "The first year we moved to the States, someone burned a sign on our lawn. I think it said _Brits Go Home_ on it, but it was hard to tell, because from the house, it looked like a burning cross. My Mum tried to protect me from that sort of shit, so we never discussed it, but I did see it from my bedroom window. We'd been here three months, and that was our introduction to America. A burning cross on our lawn."

"Christ," I said, not knowing what else to offer. "The one nice thing about moving to New York City back in the early 80s, was that it was so diverse, culturally, people from everywhere, Chinese people, Spanish families from Puerto Rico, old Jewish guys from Vienna, just everyone. I know the Upper West Side isn't really like that any more, but it was, back then. My neighbourhood was so full of people from every country on earth, that because no one belonged, everyone sort of belonged."

"If you enjoyed moving to America so much, why did you work so hard to lose your accent?" she asked, raising one eyebrow as if she could see straight through my bullshit.

"OK, you got me. I didn't actually speak to anyone at school, the first year we were here, because I was so afraid people would rip the piss out of the way I spoke. My Mum said people were just jealous, but it didn't feel like they were just jealous. When I started fifth grade, our teacher made us all learn a poem by heart, and recite it for a video. Until I saw that video, I had no idea I even had an _accent_. I felt so odd, so alien compared to the other kids. And then the next day, in art class, one of the other kids tipped a bottle of green paint down the back of my shirt. Lime green, because I was a 'limey', he said." I felt my face flushing and growing hot, at the memory of my surprise, my impotent rage, the sharp tang of acrylic, the cold wetness on the back of my head, my ruined uniform, the curls on the back of my head that had had to be shorn back to the skin because the dried paint wouldn't wash out.

"Christ," she echoed, reaching out and taking my hand gently. I felt a bit flustered, to be honest, like this was something I'd forgotten for 15 years, and was faintly blindsided by the power of the forgotten memory.

"I never thought to pack a suitcase," I said, swinging her hand gently over the half-packed suitcase. "Because I knew it wasn't an option, going back."

"Knowing something was impossible never stopped me wanting it," Merry said quietly, without meeting my eyes.

"So if you pack a suitcase and leave it at my house, are you afraid that that means you're stuck living here, with me, permanently, or are you afraid it means you'll never get to come back, _from_ England?"

Her eyes were suddenly full of tears. "I don't know, Danny. I just don't know." Dropping my hand, she stumbled off and found a tissue, then composed herself and returned to sit on the futon, the last thing we were leaving off packing until the morning. "You will come with me, up to my Mum's, right?"

"If you want me to." Being introduced to her parents, it seemed like kind of a big deal. An even bigger deal than introducing her to my sister.

"It would make things easier for me."


	12. Please love me, meet my mother (but the fear takes hold)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel accompanies Merry to Massachusetts to put the rest of her belongings into storage before she leaves on tour, and meets her family. And discovers that almost everything he thought he knew about her and her background is just ever so slightly incomplete.
> 
> And on the journey back to NYC, Merry, in a sudden burst of cold feet, makes Daniel a rather indecent proposal.

We slept one last night, on that weird rickety futon, me trying to be very quiet as I put my face between her legs and brought her off with my tongue, always trying to keep my voice down, for fear that her housemates would hear us. And then the next morning, she took the subway back to Elisha's to borrow the band's van, while I shifted the boxes downstairs into the hall. We loaded up quickly, then I chose a tape for the van stereo - Echo and the Bunnymen, which I knew she loved - and we were off. As we drove up across the top of Queens, and over the Triborough Bridge, through the Bronx into Connecticut, she started pointing out the names of familiar towns.

"Stamford. That's where we used to go to the big shops, buying furniture and stuff. Norwalk - I went to Girl Scouts in downtown Norwalk. Westport, I learned to swim at a beach club in Westport. New Canaan. I went to school in fucking New Canaan. Greenwich... oh god, they were our bitter rivals at field hockey..."

"You grew up in Connecticut?" I was shocked. She'd never talked about the years between leaving London and arriving in New York.

"I grew up in Silvermine," she confessed. "It was technically in Norwalk so the houses and the rates were cheap because the schools are shit, but it's close to the border of New Canaan so it's not quite as tarred with an 'urban blight' reputation as Norwalk. I went to the New Canaan Day School for elite boys and girls, though, no urban blight schools for me."

"How did you swing that?" Now I was impressed. My own New York Interschool day school was supposed to be good, but NCDS, that was next level wealthy. Like, children of famous actors sometimes went to Collegiate, but actual Carnegies and Vanderbuilt-Whitneys went to NCDS.

"My Mum taught European History there for the six years I attended," she confessed.

"Your Mum who is an Art History professor at Williams now?"

"And who was an Art History lecturer at Cambridge before we moved to the States. So, yes, she took a massive pay cut and a drop in status so that her daughter could go to the very best of prep schools."

"I can't imagine it was easy, being the child of faculty." I knew that the boys at Collegiate had given any faculty-brats a terrible time. And then I wondered if 'a terrible time', in suburban Connecticut, extended as far as burning signs on someone's lawn.

"Child of faculty, with an English accent, and the tallest girl in the school at the age of 12? No, it was not fun." We drove past the turn-off to New Canaan. "Do you want to see it?"

"Do you?"

"Maybe on the way home," she shrugged, and I reached out and touched her hand on the gearshift, and gave it a quick squeeze.

"I think I'm starting to understand why you didn't want to go to Williams."

"Indeed."

I changed the tape to something more upbeat and driving - a NEU! compilation - and we sang along in broken German as the car trundled up a river valley towards Massachusetts. Massachusetts in the late summer was stunningly beautiful. It was too early for the leaves to start turning, but the foliage was lush and heavy, mountainsides of green punctuated with little white clapboard villages with prim wooden Protestant churches. Williamstown was gorgeous, a proper New England college town set up around a long town square, with a massive Colonial looking coaching inn on one side. We drove through the college - the sort of leafy, brick suburban campus I had spent my teens praying I would never have to attend - and out the other side, up into the hills on the border of Vermont. The houses got less imposing, more rambling, and a bit ramshackle on this side of town; definitely not the sort of thing that ended up in glossy Ivy League college brochures. Then Merry pulled up into the driveway of a Cape Cod style Saltbox that looked as if the rear of it was collapsing back into the New England earth, and parked the car, staring balefully up into the windows.

"So this is where you grew up?" I said, when it became apparent that she was not going to get out of the van. I stared out the window at the house, which badly needed painting, the half-collapsed garage next to it, the beat-up 80s rust-bucket Subaru that I thought was a wreck until I saw the current semester Williams faculty parking sticker on the back window.

"No. I grew up in Connecticut. This house is a stranger to me."

"Miriam! Mirrrriiiiiam!" A screen door banged, and a woman had emerged and was approaching the van, shouting excitedly.

"I take it that is not a stranger to you."

"OK, come and meet my Mum."

And Merry hopped out of the van, and was instantly engulfed in a bear hug by a woman who was nearly as tall as her, but also twice her breadth and probably three times her weight, salt and pepper and white-blonde hair flying every which way, Merry in a blue paisley dress and her mother in a huge, barrel-striped patchwork quilt of a jumper. When they finally parted, the older woman turned her eyes to me.

"So this is the young man," she observed.

"Daniel," Merry supplied.

"No, I'm afraid there must be some mistake." Merry's mother had an even more distinctive English accent than Merry did. "This can't possibly be one of Miriam's boyfriends. No tattoos, no facial piercings, no leather... and he appears to be wearing, no he is wearing, an open necked pinstripe button down shirt and a casual summer blazer by Ralph Lauren. No, I absolutely refuse to believe that this is one of Miriam's suitors." It wasn't actually a Ralph Lauren, it was an incredibly expensive hand-tailored 3-button blazer made for me by a small gentleman from Hong Kong in a shop in the garment district, but I didn't quite want to disabuse her.

"He plays guitar in a rock band, and he works for the coolest record company in New York," Merry added in my defence.

"Hello, Professor Wythenshawe, I'm Daniel Asheton, it's nice to meet you," I greeted her, remembering my manners. I was quite tempted to add ' _and heir to an accounting firm which would probably be Fortune 500 if it were not privately owned by my family_...' but resisted because as funny as it would be to see her face, Merry might actually hit me.

"Professor, a nonsense, call me Meredith," she instructed. "Let me go and put the dogs on a chain or they'll eat you alive." From the interior of the house, there was the sound of much barking and snarling, then a pair of angry looking corgis appeared on chains that let them get nearly to the end of the driveway, but no further, snapping and eyeing me with malevolent intent. "Hush, the pair of you! Such a fuss over nothing. Come on, I've cleared out the back storeroom for you upstairs, but I'm sure you'll want a cup of tea first."

I felt almost completely overwhelmed by the Wythenshawe women, for their habit of both talking, at top speed, and top volume, right over the top of one another. Meredith, it seemed, was ever so slightly deaf, so she and her daughter compensated by howling at one another even louder than the dogs. I could never quite establish the nature of their relationship, which seemed to consist of complete agreement one minute, then intractable dissent the next, winding up in higher and higher pitched arguments until another cup of tea was produced, and suddenly they were back to best friends again. To be honest, I felt exhausted sitting in the same room as both of them, with Merry alternately acting completely grown-up and above it, then suddenly as petulant as a child, but my only role in the conversation seemed to be to punctuate agreements and occasionally ask for more tea when they seemed close to blows.

What an extraordinary family, I thought to myself, trying to compare them with my own, solemn lot, lunching quietly in the morning room of the flat on Central Park West, with nary a harsh word between us, but plenty of raised eyebrows and meaningful looks. But then again, if I understood the British class system correctly, my own mother was merely Middle Class, and quite reserved, while Merry's family, if she was to be believed, sprung from the Upper, and were mad as a box of frogs. But the one thing I did not understand about the British Upper Class was their imperviousness to dirt. The house was a riot of dog odour and windblown leaves and the scent of teabags, gently mouldering in little piles everywhere. I hoped that Merry had learned better than to leave teabags lying about the kitchen awaiting reuse, but if she hadn't, I would have to take her in hand. And too much time around those smelly dogs might set off an asthma attack.

Shaking my head, I rolled up my sleeves and returned to the van to start unloading it, as much to get a moment's peace and quiet, as from a sense of duty. Between the three of us, we made short work of unloading, and the boxes fit almost perfectly into the sunless room under the eaves at the back of the house. I flexed my back to iron out the kinks, then located my blazer and cast curious eyes at Merry to see when she wanted to leave.

"No, Miriam, you're not going back tonight," insisted Meredith when Merry started to look for her keys. "It's far too far, and you're exhausted from driving all that way already. Stay the night, and drive back tomorrow."

I was about to protest that I hadn't brought a change of clothes, and I had no intention of sleeping anywhere so dirty, when Merry simply shrugged and agreed. "We'll find you some pyjamas," she offered by way of consolation, as she climbed the stairs, then called back to her mother. "But we're going to Bangkok Palace for dinner, and you're treating."

"Am I," laughed Meredith and threw up her hands. Terrified of being left alone with Merry's mother, I immediately asked for the bathroom. "Oh, Miriam will have locked herself in the one upstairs for the next hour. Better use the guest loo out behind the pantry. This way."

I took longer than was really necessary, just to get some breathing room, inhaling the welcome sweetness of the lavender soap as I tried to scrub off the scent of dog in the small, grubby downstairs toilet. Meredith was friendly and rather charming in a batty sort of way, I could not fault her there. But her personality was so huge it seemed to expand to take up every last corner of space in the room. Merry appeared to have to fight for every opinion she expressed, and suddenly I started to see her skittishness in a new light. 

So I sighed deeply, ran my fingers through my hair to smooth out the curls, then headed back out to face the Wythenshawes again. Except, I couldn't find the kitchen. I had taken a wrong turning somewhere in the labyrinthine passages where the house sloped back into the mountain behind it, and instead of the kitchen, I came upon what looked like an office, or more likely a library from the distinctive ink and mildew smell of old books. There was a computer in one corner, but it, too, looked like a hold-out from another age, old enough to still be running on 5" floppy discs.

I hadn't meant to intrude, but as I backed out, I caught sight of a photo, and thought it was Merry as a child. Yes, it was obviously her, head thrown back, that distinctive gap-toothed smile still exactly the same, though she was laughing and holding onto a tow-headed little boy as they crossed a stream. I looked again, and there were more photos, but in every one of them, Merry was with the boy. Some of them were obviously in London, but others were in the countryside, a large but rather stark looking house, though in a sweepingly grand location, surrounded by Bronte-esque looking moors. A family photo, a younger Merry, the tow-headed boy, Meredith - who had clearly been quite the looker in her youth, a tall, statuesque Viking of a woman who Merry resembled quite strongly - and an older man with curly light brown hair and a crooked nose. A father. Merry never talked about her father, but the boy - it had to be a brother, they were so much alike - he was a complete surprise.

"Oh, here you are. I was beginning to wonder if you'd fallen in." Meredith bustled into the room, coming up behind me like a train.

"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to intrude. I just saw the photos... I've never seen a picture of Merry as a child."

"Yes, she was lovely, wasn't she?"

"She still is," I replied, almost reflexively.

"Oh, you are smitten," Meredith chuckled.

I prickled, but tried to get on her good side by enquiring about the family home. "Is this the ancestral estate, then?"

"That was a cottage we once had in the Peak District."

"When Merry told me she was related to the Duke of Derbyshire, I thought she might be fibbing, but if that's just a cottage..."

Meredith chortled like I'd said something hilarious. "Oh, has Miriam been telling you those stories, has she? Well, there might be some truth behind them a hundred years ago or more, but trust me, there is nothing left of the Wythenshawes now but the name."

Feeling like I'd bottomed out on that subject, I instead pointed to the photo of the two children crossing the stream. "May I ask... who's the boy?"

"MIriam's twin, Marcus."

"She's never mentioned being a twin," I blurted out. She had said she had secrets, but I wasn't expecting an evil twin.

"No, I don't expect she does." There was a touch of sadness behind her voice.

"Do they not get on?" It seemed such a shame, they were so alike, both of them with those sharply pointed noses and those mischievous grins.

"Oh, you poor dear. She hasn't told you."

"Told me what?" I asked, feeling suddenly like I was on very slippery ice, that there was something Merry had forgotten to warn me not to ask.

"He's dead." The blunt, flat word surprised me; anyone in my family would have been more delicate, would have used a euphemism like ' _passed away_ '. Her voice, too, was very flat, resigned rather than emotionless, as if it were an old wound, but the sense of energy, the huge presence of Meredith in the room faded slightly and seemed to ebb away. "Her father and brother, they were both killed in a fire, back in England. We had rented out our house in London, and were living in the cottage while Jack - my husband - worked on a book. It really was in a shocking state, there was no money; the National Trust in those days just let things go to rack and ruin. The wiring was bad, and someone left a heater on unattended, and there was a terrible fire. It just came straight up the stairs from the hall. Miriam was with us in the front bedroom, so we could climb down the ivy to safety. But Jack, he wouldn't wait for the fire engine, he went into the back of the house to fetch Marcus. Neither of them ever came out. We lost everything." As practised a story as it seemed, her voice still quavered on the last part.

"I am so sorry for your loss, I can't even begin to imagine," I blurted out, feeling I'd made a terrible mess of things.

"Thank you, but it's a very long time ago now. I thought it was the right thing to do, for Miriam and myself to move to America, make a new start. But I don't think she ever really got over losing her country any more than she got over losing her brother."

"You mustn't let my mother tell you nonsense," Merry announced, reappearing at the door to the room. She walked briskly up to me, took me by the hand, and started to pull me away. "I was very young when it happened; I barely remember either of them. Come on, let's go to Bangkok Palace."

But by now, I knew Merry enough to know when she was bluffing. It had shaken her more than she wanted to admit, and I found myself squeezing her hand and holding her closer, dropping a kiss on her cheek when her mother's back was turned.

"Dogs or no dogs?" asked Meredith.

"Oh bring them, we'll sit outside," shrugged Merry. "But you'll have to hold them in the back of the van so they don't leap on me when I'm driving." And suddenly we were all piling into the van, these enormous women, the yapping dogs, and me, almost shocked by the way the two women had completely shifted gear, as if the whole scene in the office had never actually happened.

We had a pleasant enough dinner at the Thai Restaurant, Meredith smacking her lips over Bangkok duck, tossing the bones to the dogs as they waddled greedily about her feet, while Merry and I shared vegetarian Pad Thai and Monk Vegetables. I offered to pay for the meal, out of politeness more than anything else, and was surprised when Meredith looked slightly relieved, accepted, and put her credit card away. So the aristocracy really were stingy on top of everything else? Never mind, it was inexpensive, and the brownie points were worth it, right? We had a walk around the college at dusk, me feeling about a million years older than the students milling around the campus centre shouting at one another. Then it was back to the house, and separate bedrooms, because for all her intellectual affectations, Meredith was still very, very old fashioned.

Unfortunately, Merry slept rather badly, but luckily, that meant she didn't want to hang around, she just wanted to go home. So after a rather yappy breakfast, during while I was drooled over and jumped upon by two over enthusiastic corgis, Merry hugged both dogs and mother goodbye and the van rolled off. I felt the silence like a welcome blanket, after the noise of her mother, and didn't really want to turn on the stereo, so we drove in near silence back down through Massachusetts.

"So what did you make of my mother?"

Now that was a loaded question. "She's very... um... well, she's very."

That tickled Merry, who burst out laughing. "Yes, she is very _very_."

"I thought, sometimes, when she was talking, that she didn't leave any space to breathe. It must have been enormously difficult growing up around her," I observed.

"Perhaps. But if she takes up all the space in a room, that leaves no space for grief to seep in, either."

I couldn't quite tell if she considered this a good thing or a bad thing, so I waited for more that was not forthcoming. Desperately, I wanted to ask her about her father, about her brother, but her silence seemed so heavy. "If you want to talk, I'm willing to listen..."

"I don't talk about it. Ever. Don't ask me again." Her tone was decisive, final.

So warned, I changed the subject. "Do you still feel like taking me to see your childhood school?"

"Yes, let's. Why not, it'll be fun."

But Merry didn't treat it like it was fun. She drove up the long, tree-lined driveway and parked in front of the mansion that was NCDS's main school building, but again, showed no indication to get out, and this time there were no old women or corgis to dislodge her from the van. She just sat, arms still gripping the wheel, staring moodily at the playing field where a group of girls in short kilts were chasing a ball around with hockey sticks.

"I'm trying to imagine you playing field hockey as a teenager. I bet you were adorable," I ventured, and that raised a smile for about 20 seconds, but she was just in a strange mood. After a few more attempts, I just gave up. "Come on, you're not happy. Let's just go."

"Alright, if you're bored already." Punching the van into gear violently, she revved the engine and drove off.

"I'm not bored, I'm just..." She wasn't even listening to me. I rolled my window down and stared out at the beautiful mansions rolling by, inhaling the smell of immaculately clipped lawns. It was a strange neighbourhood, giving the impression of being rural, with paddocks full of horses and long stone walls and ponds, but also seemed oddly suburban, as if it were only playing at being farmland. None of the land was agricultural, all of it was dedicated to pleasure, or to displaying subdued yet unmistakable wealth.

"You know, it's funny," Merry finally ventured after I'd given up on talking. "I hated it when I lived here. I absolutely resented it, like I resented all these rich wankers. I used to dream of nothing else but leaving, and going back to England, and if I couldn't make it as far as England, I would settle for New York. But now I'm about to leave for England, for real, I don't want to go, and all I can think about is staying."

"Are you getting cold feet over the label thing?"

"Cold feet... cold doesn't even begin to cover it. I don't want to do any of it. I don't want to model. I don't want to be the singer. I don't want to fight with Elisha, but he just wants to hate me for something I haven't even done. Why are we even doing this, Danny?"

"Because it's your childhood dream, just like it's mine."

"I wish I could just pack it up in a box and give it to you!"

"Merry!" I turned to her, suddenly very worried. "What's got into you? What is this? You are the most ambitious woman I have ever met, and I have always admired that in you..."

She smiled wryly. "Considering you work with Bebe Newcolm, wow, that's some opinion you have of me."

"I'd consider that a compliment, if I were you."

"Bebe Newcolm, who threatened to sack Elisha from his own band."

"He never really would have gone."

"He's got nothing else to fall back on. Men who have nothing to lose are dangerous when cornered."

"Elisha's a pussycat, really. Less dangerous than one of your mother's fat, waddling dogs."

She humphed loudly, but then, as she turned the van round the corner of a long, winding lane, she pointed out a beautiful white Colonial mansion, nestling at the end of a tree-lined drive. "Isn't that absolutely perfect. I've always dreamed of a house like that, 5 windows upstairs, 4 downstairs, with a door in the centre. So symmetrical, so perfect."

"Couple of barns in the back for horses, I'd love to live somewhere like that," I agreed, happy to have found a new, more pleasant game to play.

"It's for sale," observed Merry. "God, can you imagine how much money it would take to live somewhere like that. Rock star kinda money."

"You know, if I took over the running of my father's firm, in about 5 years, I'd be earning that kind of money." It made me feel almost dirty to think that way, but I knew what the partners earned. For a moment, I tried to consider it, what would happen if I really did quit the music business at 25. In five years... I'd be 30 by the time I was a partner. That kind of house would just come with the job. I squinted at the sunlight reflecting off the dormer windows and tried to imagine Merry being married to me, and going round the house, cleaning the windows. Heck, we'd probably have a maid to do that. I tried to imagine Merry bossing round maids like Meredith bossed round the dogs.

"Is there a number, shall we ring them up and ask to go and look at it?" Merry suggested, a spark coming back into her eyes for the first time all day.

"You've got to be joking."

"No, look, there's an open house. Oh, let's go and see it, Danny. What a lark."

"In this van? And covered in corgi hair?"

"New Canaan people are always covered in dog hair, it's because they're pretending to be farmers," Merry shrugged, and indicated to turn up the long drive. The house really was stunning, the setting was spectacular, and the architecture, close up, was the kind of old fashioned that could only be described as picturesque. Merry bounced towards the Real Estate Broker hanging around outside and chirpily announced "We would like to see the house."

The agent looked us up and down as if trying to type us, but I saw her take in the expensive Italian jeans that cost more than a week's wages, the hand-stitched tailored blazer, and could see her make the calculation that we might be marginal, but she couldn't afford to miss us out. "May I take your names?"

"Mr and Mrs Asheton. Ash-e-ton with an E." It was Merry's cut-glass accent that sealed the deal for them. I hadn't even noticed her do it, but she'd switched one of her hippie silver rings to her wedding finger.

"Address?"

"Oh, we've been staying with Mummy while we're looking for a place of our own, you don't want to bother them there," Merry lied casually through her teeth.

"Employer, then."

I stepped forward, flashing my signet ring. "Asheton Industrial Accounting. Daniel J. Asheton, Jr. at your service."

"Oh, right away sir." I could see the change in her face. _Those_ Ashetons. It was a glimpse of a world that I might indeed, inhabit, but for a simple lifestyle choice, so why did I feel so much like a fake?

Merry took my hand and squeezed it as we followed the woman inside, raising her eyebrows in amusement. The estate agent was explaining the property and its amenities, eight bedrooms, five and a half baths - and Merry looked at me and mouthed _eight bedrooms, let's fuck in each one_ and I had to cough to cover my laugh - and one of the barns had been converted to a modern entertainment centre with a guest apartment that the owners could use for a live-in servant if they needed, but the other one still held livestock, and boasted about how many racehorses the estate could support. My head spun with it all, but Merry was clearly enjoying herself, asking about school districts and local amenities with the practised decorum of a young mother. We walked around the downstairs with Merry exclaiming over the curtains and asking if the fittings came with it - negotiable, of course, like everything - but as we started to mount the main staircase, curving up the centre of the building, a gunboat of a black Mercedes sailed down the drive. We'd been outclassed.

"Excuse me, Mr, Mrs Asheton. Do you mind if I leave you alone for a moment? Please feel free to examine the upstairs bedrooms at your leisure, but I must greet the next clients personally. Do come down and ask if you have any questions, and I will catch up with you later."

Merry and I exchanged looks, and trotted up the stairs the moment the agent was out of earshot, laughing like children. We raced from room to room, exclaiming over the views and the ridiculous furniture, and the size of the fucking rooms. Four bedrooms and three baths on the 2nd floor, another four bedrooms and two baths in the attic. Who on earth needed that many bedrooms? Especially when the bathtubs themselves were the size of Merry's futon. But oddly, despite the opulence, I found I didn't actually like the house. A farmhouse should have smelled of leather and tack soap and baking bread, but the freshly redecorated house didn't actually smell of anything except wallpaper glue and paint. It smelled too new to be real. Leaving her to explore the master bedroom suite, I walked through to the other side, and tried to peer out towards the barns.

"Which bedroom would you have?" I asked, looking out over the view sloping back down towards a lake, hidden out of sight of the road.

"The two at the front, don't be silly," she laughed, waltzing from one of two attached bedrooms to the next. "His and hers bedrooms, each with its own private bath. Can you imagine?"

"And you're having both of them, are you?" I asked, sticking my head back through the door.

"No, you can have one," she chirped, flopping down on the bed and bouncing, hard. It didn't even creak. "And I'd always let you visit..."

"I think I'd rather have the one at the back, with the view of the lake."

"There's a lake?" Merry exclaimed, excited, and followed me back to the bigger bedroom, looking out through picture windows to the view. Sprawling across the double king sized bed, elbows behind her head, she gazed at the lake, smiling salaciously. "Oh this is gorgeous, the lake, the barns, the Colonial architecture; it turns me on just looking at that."

I laughed and flopped down next to her, patting her on the thigh. "It is beautiful, but not as beautiful as you, my dear."

Suddenly Merry's eyes lit up with that dangerous light, and she turned to me urgently. "Lock the door."

I got up and did as I was told without questioning, feeling my heart pounding in my throat. Bending down, I kissed her, softly at first, but her mouth was insistent, and she pulled me down on top of her. Soon we were making out in earnest, my hands on her breasts, my tongue down her throat, and her hands tearing at the flies of my jeans.

As her hand touched my cock, I came to my senses and realised where we were and what we were doing. "Merry, stop it. I haven't got any condoms on me."

"I don't care, let's do it anyway."

"Merry..." I hissed, but her hands were working inside my jeans, and I just couldn't help myself, pushing up the hem of her skirt and feeling tentatively between her thighs. She was _wet_. So architecture made her horny; that was interesting.

"I mean it. Get inside me, now." She was rubbing against me so urgently that it took every fibre of my self control not to just do it.

"What if you get pregnant?" But she just pushed my jeans off my hips, then yanked her tights and panties down to the floor. I was sliding back and forth between her outer lips, and it would be so easy just to push inside her.

"If you get me pregnant, we get married. You keep saying you want to."

"I do, but..." Oh, she was deliberately angling her hips to try to engulf me, oh christ, that was it, I was inside her, and her cunny closed around me like a mouth, sucking gently. She felt so slick and wet without a condom in the way that my cock was already twitching slightly, so close to climax. No, no, I would just do this for a little while and then pull out. "You can't go on tour with a baby. What about the album launch?"

"No," she said, though her breath kept catching in her throat as I angled the thrusts of my cock to excite her. Downstairs, I could hear people shifting around, and was terrified that they would come upstairs at any moment, try the locked door and figure something was up. I pushed harder, making Merry moan softly, but the old walls of the mansion kept our secrets. "I mean it, Danny. If you get me pregnant, I'll marry you. But we get out, all the way. I quit the band, and you go get a real job, at your Dad's company."

"Merry!" But I was too far gone to stop it, now. "You don't mean that. You're just freaked out because of your Mum and because of Elisha being weird... the minute you get on tour, you will love it again and want to go through with it all."

"Elisha will find another bass player. At this point, he wants... another... bass... player..." 

For a terrifying moment, I thought I heard footsteps on the stairs, but no. There was the creak of a door, then I heard voices outside the window, and saw the interloper couple head out to investigate the entertainment centre in the barn. For a moment, I relaxed, but then I concentrated on Merry, bringing her to orgasm with the shaft of my cock and the pressure of my thumb on her clitoris. Once she had come, I would pull out, and then... but a part of me really wanted it. The thought of being married to Merry... of me and Merry conceiving a child, it was ludicrous how much it turned me on, but then again, barebacking her like this, the feel of her juices slick against my cock, it was _way_ better this way.

"You'll marry me," I said.

"I will. If I get pregnant." And with that, she threw her head back, and I could see from her gurning and the catch of her breath as her body quivered that she was coming, and fast. But still, I didn't pull out.

"Oh fuck it," I thought to myself, and ploughed on. I brought my mouth down on hers, sucking her tongue into mine, and started to buck at her wildly, feeling my orgasm build up in my groin, until I shot deep inside her. Still moving my hips, I sucked the last moments of pleasure from her body as I spasmed a few times, then lay back against her and kissed her face again and again.

She just lay there for a few minutes, beaming with post-coital bliss and whispering my name as she tangled her fingers in my hair. But as I heard the voices of the other couple coming back across the back lawn, I suddenly panicked. Oh shit. What had we done? What had I just agreed to? Marry her? Yes my throat still tightened with the pleasure of the idea. But a child? There was no way I was ready for a child. And her talk of quitting the band and giving it up to become a New Canaan housewife... No. It was nerves, that was all. Cold feet. And there was no reason to bring in the patter of tiny feet on account of cold feet.

But as I raised myself up and pulled out of her, gazing down at her satisfied face below, my heart suddenly melted. The image of the tow-headed boy haunted me. A child. A baby. Me and Merry could have a baby. Suddenly I wanted it more than anything. More than anything in the world, except...

"Merry, get up, they're coming upstairs," I warned.

"If I lie flat for 20 minutes afterwards, that means the sperm have an easier path to fertilise the egg."

For a moment, I was torn, but then sense prevailed. "We're going to have to risk it! Come on, into the en suite. I'll delay them while you clean up."

Finally, she did as I asked, and pulled herself off the bed and walked through, sleepily, as if in a dream, into the bathroom. I buttoned my jeans and tucked in my shirt, then set about rearranging the bedclothes where they'd come loose. Shit, there was a damp patch in the middle of the coverlet, but there wasn't much I could do about that. Throwing open the doors of the cupboard opposite, I saw clothes, dresses, as if someone was still living in the house, but I persisted with my search, until I found a spare blanket. Thank fuck. Seizing it, I spread it out over the wet patch and hoped for the best. There. The room still stank of sex, but that would pass if I cracked one of the windows open. Now where was Merry?

I walked through into the bathroom to find her mopping up her legs before pulling up her tights. After washing my hands, I searched for her shoes, which had gone missing in the scuffle, popped them on her feet, then unlocked the bathroom door and stepped out into the hall. Just in time to meet the estate agent herding the next couple up the stairs. They were an older couple, much older than me, and I nodded politely to them as they passed.

But suddenly the man caught sight of me. "Danny? Little Danny Asheton, you are the spitting image of your father at that age. What a surprise! Oh, I bet you don't remember me, it has been years. Henry. Henry Lannings." We shook hands awkwardly as Merry reappeared from inside the room, looking dazed and slightly rumpled, but otherwise as beautiful as a new day.

"My wife, Merry," I stuttered, trying to keep up the charade without any way of knowing where this would end.

"Charmed, I'm sure. Didn't know you were married, my boy. Congratulations to you both! Let me know where the register is, and we'll send over a gift. Are you thinking of investing in the property? Lovely family home," Henry blustered. I shrugged non-comittally while Merry just beamed at them, far too blissed up with post-coital glow to talk. "I'm thinking of buying it for our son, Blandford. You remember Blandford, don't you? You two were at school together, I think? How's your old father, anyway? Business still booming?"

"Business still booming," I agreed, then nodded and bowed stiffly. "Do remember me to Blandford, and good luck with the house."

"Oh, we'll outbid you if we decide to buy," guffawed Henry. "Don't you worry." As Merry and I escaped down the back stairs, I could hear Henry barking away to the estate agent. "Lovely people, those Ashetons. Really the right sort. He's a credit to the father, that young Danny, a real chip off the old block. I wish to god our Blandford would settle down and get married. What a stunner, that filly. An absolute stunner."

Merry and I escaped the house in streams of giggles, making it as far as the van before we both collapsed in paroxysms of laughter. "I say, what a stunner," lampooned Merry, nearly apoplectic with giggles.

"A fine filly, a fine filly, what a brood mare, does she come with the house?" I blustered back.

"Is she negotiable? Fixtures and fittings? Really the right sort - rilly rilly," she neighed, then tried to compose herself and looked over at me. "I don't think I really want to live in Connecticut now."

"Well, I don't know, you could probably still marry Blandford if you rush," I said snippily, though honestly, I actually felt more pity for Blandford than anything else.

"What terrible people. Can you imagine having them for in-laws?" She was suddenly much more solemn than I was. "Did you and Blandford really go to school together?" she asked suddenly.

"Yes," I sighed, feeling my attack of the giggles ebbing away. What had we just done? I didn't really entirely know how I felt about any of it, like half of me thought we had just thrown both our _lives_ away over a momentary burst of lust, and the other half of me thought that it was the first brave and honest decision in my life.

"it's just pure blind luck, isn't it, genetics? That you can go to the same school, and you can come from the same city and the same background, but he is such a massive entitled cunt and you are such a beautiful human being." Folding her hands over her flat belly, she seemed to be considering what kind of genetic material she had just let me shoot up her cunt. And then I noticed that apart from dissing Blandford, she had also just paid me the most wonderful compliment, and I smiled, and extended my own hand to cover hers.

"I daw you so much, and I really do wish we were married, pregnant or not."

She just smiled and threw the van into gear. "We'll see."


	13. Cruel, Cruel Summer, Leaving Me Here On My Own

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After one last celebratory blow-out at the Lacuna Lounge, Merry and Deltawave are off to tour Europe for the first time. And Daniel is left at home, wondering if he's really ready for marriage and fatherhood. Or, indeed, if he is ready for his 25th birthday, when he will either have to leave the music industry and everything he loves behind to assume the responsibilities of adulthood, or say goodbye to his trustafarian lifestyle and parent-subsidised flat on Ludlow Street.
> 
> Or will help come from an unlikely source... his sister Pricilla?

And so, for the last weeks before Deltawave left for Britain, Merry and I played house in the tiny flat on Ludlow Street. I liked having her around, her clothes in my closets, her fresh vegetables in my fridge, the smell of her girly facial products in my bathroom. I really liked walking in from work, and seeing her sitting on the sofa, her hands gently cradling her non-existent belly, staring off into the middle distance with an expression of half contentment, half terror on her face.

"Hullo, Missus," I told her, walking over and sitting down beside her, kissing her belly before kissing her face. "Thinking of baby names?"

"No, video treatments."

"Tell me about it, I've been looking at video treatments all day."

Rubbing her belly, she looked up at me with long-suffering worry. "Elisha has thrown a fit about the rushes for the _Shame_ video, he hates it. He's demanded not that just they re-edit the whole video, but that they change the lead single. He's insisting it be _Autotelic_. A track that he sings lead on."

"It's too late to change singles," I protested.

"It's not, but Barry's got another band in the studio, so it is too late to re-cut the lead vocals, which is what Bebe countered with." She paused, rubbing her eyes distractedly. "So he's got his wish; he's singing lead on the first single."

"But _Autotelic_ is a terrible choice for lead single. It's... Well, the song is fine, but that name. No one knows what the fuck Autotelic even means." Not only had I had to look it up in the dictionary, myself, but Dieter had caught me doing so, and blinked his reptilian eyes with amusement, and sneered _you really don't know what it means?_ pretending to be astonished, with a slightly superior air, that I, an NYU Philosophy major with a 4.0 GPA, did not know what a word like Autotelic meant.

"It's not just the name, it's the video - that expensive fucking concept video that we shot for _Shame_ \- with all that fucking money - it just won't _work_ with _Autotelic_ , no matter how they edit it. I know they're the same BPM, but the mood is completely different. What a stupid fucking waste of time and money and ego."

I stared at her in horror. "When did this all go down?" I demanded.

"Twenty minutes ago. He deliberately waited for you to leave work, because he thinks you're Team Wythenshawe now. I tried to ring and warn you, but you'd already left. You really should get a cell phone."

"Well," I gasped. And I thought Elisha had trusted me. "I guess we won't be calling the baby Elisha, then."

Merry glared at me for a moment, then let out a brief burst of tense laughter. "Not even on my list."

"So you have been thinking of baby names."

"Danielle, if it's a girl," she confessed, and I practically purred with pleasure, secretly wishing for a girl, a girl with blonde hair and big green eyes. "Marcus, or maybe Mark, for a boy."

"I think those are both brilliant names," I told her, and kissed her.

There were to be two parties before Deltawave left for Britain. The big, official party at the Mercury Lounge, not a record release party, but a showcase for the finished songs, to play them for British journalists who were too impatient for a scoop to wait until Deltawave left for Europe. Because, really, who didn't love a fully funded press jaunt to NYC on a magazine's tab? Metropolis had bagged the support spot - as if there were really any competition - which made it doubly weird and doubly exciting. I had thought it would either be completely nerve-wracking or completely amazing, playing in front of so many people who were now my colleagues, but in truth it was just weird. It was so obviously Merry's night that I felt doubly like an interloper, first when I started feeling painfully insecure that we'd only got the support slot because I was her boyfriend, then again as Bebe started talking among the Windlass crowd and claiming all the responsibility for the band's discovery. I told myself that it was all good exposure, especially as some people actually remembered us as 'that great band that had blown Bellyflop off the stage', but for the most part it was something I'd rather have avoided, and let the whole thing be Merry's night.

Then there was a second informal party at the Lacuna Lounge, just for the scene, really, as the Mercury Lounge gig had sold out. Neither of our bands were playing - it was Fab's turn to play rock star for the night - but Charlene had said she'd stand us free drinks, as she was so proud of her successful "alumni." (And then in two and a half weeks' time, there was the party that I was really dreading, my own 25th birthday party, but I was doing my best not to think about that, dodging my own mother's phone calls.)

But the Lacuna Lounge was the last time that all of us would be together, crammed into or standing around that fateful booth in the front window where I'd first, hesitantly, flirted with Merry. And now she was sitting next to me, folded into the crook of my arm, nursing a coke, and smiling like the cat who got the canary. I squeezed her affectionately, and she turned to flash me a smile, and I was about to kiss her when a flashbulb exploded in our faces. Fucking hell, it was that NME journalist and his photographer who had somehow invited themselves along to get a sneak peak at the "Ludlow St Scene" on their home territory. I had tried to get rid of them, had tried to palm them off by telling them to go to Max Fish where all the drunken British ex pats and assholes from Jersey hung out, but somehow they had tagged along with the persistence of actual journalists.

"Come on, you're a good looking couple," insisted the photographer, looking wounded as I shot him a filthy stare. "Best dressed people in here."

I glanced down at my tailored suit, then looked at Merry, resplendent in the sleeveless silver sheath dress from Antique Boutique that she had dropped hints about until I bought for her birthday, then let my gaze wander around the room. Elisha and Mandy, well, Mandy was cute but I didn't understand what she saw in Elisha. Doyle and Effie were chatting to them, and Effie was so clearly a beautiful girl, in her immaculate Parisian clothes, but Doyle let the side down badly, slouching about in a pair of black adidas trackie bottoms and a ratty Musketeer t-shirt, implausibly paired with a pair of dress shoes I knew for a fact he had had since high school. Gabe, who looked absolutely great, but never seemed to appear in public with any woman, to the point where I sometimes wondered if he was gay. Dieter... well, now I knew that Dieter was generally considered much more physically attractive than I was, but for some reason, recently Dieter had grown a moustache and started dressing like Charles Ryder from Brideshead Revisited, since some girl had told him he looked a bit like Jeremy Irons. Jeremy Irons could barely pull off a moustache; Dieter just looked like a child molester, which might well have been appropriate given I had no idea how his teenage date had got into the bar anyway. Dick and Jessica, now they gave us a run for the money, as Dick had definitely upped his suit game since joining the band, but Jessica, though she was tiny and beautiful, there was still something inhuman about her, like she was an angel from a tree top and not an actual girl. While Merry, Merry was very clearly flesh and blood and totally squeezable, with the kind of mouth you couldn't look at and not imagine kissing.

And as I looked around the room again, my heart swelled with pride, as I realised that actually I was sitting with my arm around the best-looking woman in the room. Possibly the best-looking woman on the Lower East Side, but definitely the best-looking woman I had ever actually even met, even counting my sister's Vogue-model friends. How the fuck had I lucked out like this? Half of me already felt nostalgic for the whole scene, knowing that I would soon turn 25 and have to leave it, but if I left it with Merry for my wife? I could live with that. Burying my nose in her hair, I told her that I dawed her, and then casually asked how quickly we could bust out of this joint, go across the road and just go to bed. She laughed and told me that she had an early flight the next morning, but still, she couldn't quite bring herself to leave.

"Put some music on the juke box," she urged me, as the music momentarily faded, before turning back to the NME journalist. "Danny has the absolute _best_ taste in music. He know more about music than anyone I've ever met in my life," she gushed, and I blushed slightly, feeling the pressure of her flattery as I made my way to the juke box before anyone else got to it.

I pushed a fiver into the slot, then selected half an hour of music, programming it all very carefully with the flow of a DJ. I started with Spacemen 3, and the drum pattern of _Suicide_ rang out across the bar. Punching more numbers, I followed it with Mexican Summers, an early Dead Letters track, then some My Bloody Valentine. Velvets, definitely the Velvets, you couldn't come to the Lower East Side without hearing something off the Banana Album. Joy Division? No, too obvious. Early New Order, much better, _Blue Monday_ , that was the one - no, wait, not _Blue Monday_ , it was getting a bit played out. How about _Temptation_? Yeah, _Temptation_ was the cool choice, followed by some Berlin era Bowie, how about _Fame_ and of course Kraftwerk, followed by Afrika Bambaataa to show off my eclectic side. That would definitely impress the NME journalist. Eight songs so far, that meant two left, the crucial two. I remembered Merry and punched in the code for a Curse song I knew had a killer bassline.

When I did not return after a few minutes, Merry bounced over, her eyes flashing with mischief, with Gabe on her heels. "Just coming to see what's taking you so long."

"It's a delicate art," I told her, flipping the CD covers back and forth to try and choose the perfect closer. "One song left."

Sipping her drink, Merry peered into the depths of the juke box. "Ooh, ooh, Bananarama!" she urged, pointing at the track.

"No way," I sneered, trying to figure out whether to close on The Jam or The Smiths. The Smiths were definitely cooler, but The Jam were more obscure.

"Bananarama? What track?" Gabe asked, his eyes wide.

" _Cruel Summer_ ," Merry urged.

"No, I mean, what's the track number, I'll punch it in." Gabe cackled with laughter, leaning right over me with his longer arms.

"G-347," Merry supplied, as I tried to slap both of their hands away, but it was too late. The song was punched in, Merry and Gabe both squealing with triumph. The last notes of _Suicide_ faded away, and the juke box cranked back into action, the tracks spilling out, all out of order, as the unmistakable riff of Bananarama rang out across the bar. As I cringed by the speakers, throwing a pained glance back towards the journalists, Merry and Gabe were bouncing up and down with delight, Merry's hair flying everywhere as she sang along. "Hot summer streets and the pavements are burning, I sit around trying to smile, but the air is so heavy and dry. Strange voices are saying..." She flashed an expectant grin at Gabe.

"What do they say?" Gabe supplied, in a falsetto.

"Things I can't understand!" Merry shouted, grabbing me by the hands and pulling me into a mad dance.

Across the room, the NME journalist was suddenly on his feet. "Choon!" he shouted at us, dancing his way across the room. Soon, he, Gabe and Merry were all shouting "It's a cruel - _cruel_! - cruel summer, leaving me here on my own..."

I could barely believe it. The worst song in the world, and yet somehow Merry's enthusiasm had everyone on their feet and dancing.

We ended up closing the place. Every time I wanted to leave, another friend seemed to come over with their well wishes. And while Merry was still in such a good mood, friendly and excited, I couldn't bear to see her denied. And so we milled around, talking, chatting, schmoozing and being schmoozed, as the bar slowly cleared out. And it was just like that first night I'd met her, except there was no Blandford, and she was going home with me. We made exhausted, drunken, sloppy love one last time, not even bothering with the condoms we'd neglected to use all week. Then the next morning, Merry woke at some ungodly hour at the crack of dawn, kissed me lightly as I stood at the door, unable to keep my eyes open, even to catch a last glimpse of her lugging her suitcase down the last flight of steps to the curb before stepping into a taxi. Then she was gone.

I crawled back to bed and slept for the rest of the weekend.

On Monday morning, she called me at work, her voice crackling across the bad transatlantic connection. My heart leapt as I heard her voice, just happy that she had actually remembered me this time, but then dashed into a thousand pieces. "Well, Danny, you're off the hook."

"What? Off the hook how?" My mind had been so completely engaged with the thought of avoiding my 25th birthday that my first impulse was that it was something to do with that.

"I got my period all over the plane, very messily, I might add. It was rather embarrassing, but the good news is, you're off the hook. You don't have to marry me after all." Her voice was chipper, too chipper for what she was telling me.

Staring into the giant colour poster of Deltawave that I kept pinned above my desk at work, to keep me on-track, I felt my life slipping out from under me. Not marry Merry? My first reaction was slick, viscous despair. The house in Connecticut, the career at my father's firm that I'd finally started to reconcile myself to, all of it drowned under a sticky wave I imagined seeping across the plane like red tar. It had been the only thing that had been getting me through the thought of turning 25 and having to leave my East Village life behind.

But Merry sounded like herself again, burbling with excitement, the strange, demure mother-like creature gone, leaving my excitable old girlfriend in its place. "But oh my god, Daniel... Camden... it's so fucking amazing. It's everything I always dreamed of. _Everyone_ is in a band! People from the pages of Select Magazine just walking down the street! I've never felt like I just belonged somewhere so easily, it's fucking brilliant being a musician here. We're staying in a hotel in Swiss Cottage at the moment, but the market is just a short walk away. You'd love it so much, the records... the _clothes_... I keep imagining buying things for you, you'd look so cute in. Proper Fred Perrys, vintage suits, and the shoes... oh my god, Danny, tell me your size and I'll bring you back a proper pair of oxblood Doc Martens, you'll look like a right mod..." she babbled on and on at speed, while I gripped the edge of my desk and tried to reconcile myself to being neither a husband nor a father.

But still, it was hopeful for my career as an A&R to hear her excited, and thrilled to be in a band again. Wasn't it? "So how's Elisha, is he still causing problems?" I probed, trying to remember that I was supposed to be acting as her A&R.

"He's _fine_ ," Merry said airily. "The liaison at the London office of Windlass actually sent a limo - in Ely's name, not ours, mind - which got him in Ely's good books. But they showed us the re-cut version of the _Autotelic_ video, and he's actually totally right. It suits the mood and the pacing of that song so much better. And secretly... no, I shouldn't tell you this."

"Go on, tell me. If you can't trust me by now..." I insisted, leaning in closer to the phone and closing my eyes to blot out everything but her enthusiasm.

"I don't actually want to be the singer. I _want_ to be the bassist. It was Bebe pushing me into being the frontman, and I don't want to be a fucking frontman. Being the frontman means having to _talk_ to people, and I joined a band to avoid ever having to talk to people again. All my life, I have wanted to play bass in a rock band, since I saw Simon Fillup playing bass in The Curse Play Orange. And I am hugely relieved to be just playing bass in a rock band again. Let Ely do that singing shit, I hate it."

The relief in her voice was so palpable that I had to wonder if she was projecting her relief at not being a mother onto the relief in tension in the band. In my heart, I knew Bebe was right. Merry was the reason that people packed into the Mercury Lounge to see them, not Elisha. But if I couldn't persuade my own girlfriend of that fact, I was impotent as an A&R man, wasn't I? "I wish you would have more self confidence," I told her uselessly.

"I have plenty of self confidence - especially thanks to you - I just don't want to be the singer. Anyway, let me go. They're throwing us a party tonight, and I need to get ready."

"Maybe Graham Cooper will be there," I teased, though my heart wasn't in it.

"Maybe he will," she laughed back and rang off.

I went home that evening and got very, very, uncharacteristically drunk. I wanted to be so drunk that I didn't actually feel it when I burst into tears, or punched the wall - not too hard because I was afraid for my guitar-playing hand - then collapsed in a heap on my bed, which still smelled faintly of Merry. Thank fuck I had not actually rung my father to tell him our plans. Thank fuck.

I tried to drink more, but just ended up making myself throw up, then made my way back to the living room, feeling grim. I wanted to call someone, but who would I call? Doyle. Doyle would know what to do. The phone just rang and rang; he and Effie were probably out. It was then that I saw the blinking red light of the answering service, and realised I had been avoiding the messages from my family for far too long. But this message wasn't even from my parents, it was from my sister.

"Daniel, what the fuck is going on? Call me. Bye."

Figuring that she was the least bad option of the three of them, I hit the number of her cell phone, trying to keep the slur of the drink out of my voice. "Pricilla, what's up?"

"Daniel." There was a pause as she asked for time to find somewhere private to talk. "Daniel, did you get married?"

_No. No, I did not get fucking married, and that, exactly, is the problem_ , I wanted to say, but managed to stop the words before they spilled out of my mouth. "Where did you hear that I had?"

"Our dad," she informed me. "Rang me up, asking in a very concerned voice, if I knew anything about you getting married. See, apparently one of his old business partners rang him up to congratulate him on the marriage of his son, and enquire where the gift registry was. Now, I know that you are serious about Merry, but if you just eloped, without even telling me..."

Henry Lannings. Of course. I rubbed the bridge of my nose, slipping my thumb and forefinger back and forth between my deep-set eyes, and tried to think. "No, Pris, Merry and I have not got married."

"OK." There was a huge sigh of relief at the other end of the phone.

"Yet," I added. "I know what that was about. We went to look at some house in Connecticut, just on a lark, when we were up visiting her Mum. We didn't realise it would get back to anyone... But we've decided not to get married, not at this time."

"So you can go up and visit her family all the way in Connecticut, but you can't come as far as Central Park West to see your own?" She sounded exactly like our mother when she nagged me, the same intonation, though without the flattened Hampstead vowels.

"Don't you start, Pris."

"Look, meet me for dinner tomorrow, Danny. I'm not discussing this over the phone, but we have got to talk, before your birthday."

"I don't know if I can do tomorrow, I might have meetings..." _I might have a hangover_ , was what I really meant.

"This is not optional. 7pm at Tea and Sympathy. See you then." She hung up before I could protest, and I sank down to the floor, then rolled over on my back, groaning.

Of course I had a wicked hangover for most of the day, but still managed to fill myself full of aspirin and alka seltzer and somehow got down to the West Village in time to meet my sister. I hated Tea and Sympathy, I hated the whole chintzy fake-British thing, and what was worse, all the chirpy cockney waitresses just reminded me of my missing girlfriend. But Pricilla loved it, loved the stodgy tasteless food and the tacky decor, though really, considering she was only 18 months older than me, there was no way she could remember much more of England than I did. Still, I kissed her politely on the cheek and told her she looked great as she ordered her bubble and squeak and her cauliflower cheese at the counter. Overpriced touristy tat, I thought to myself, but clearly she wanted comfort food, so I shrugged and ordered the same, plus extra roasties.

I thanked the waitress as she brought our meals over, then grasped gratefully for the pot of tea, even as I tried to ignore the queasy-making smell of the bubble and squeak. "Why do we always eat here?" I muttered, not really expecting my sister to answer. "The tea is great, sure, but the food really is revolting."

"Do you remember..." she ventured, with that far-away look in her eye that indicated she was sinking deep into nostalgia. "The first year we moved here, and we went to that posh restaurant out in Westport, and you spent ages explaining to the waiter that you wanted chips. Chips, not crisps, but chips."

"Oh god," I said, rolling my eyes. So we were back at this, were we?

"And when they brought out a plate of American chips - what you thought as crisps - because you didn't know the word for French Fries, you were so disappointed, and Mum thought you were going to cry the place down?"

"I remember," I sighed, pushing the rubbery cabbage to one side of my plate. "We thought American food was terrible, then, didn't we? Crisps instead of chips, and the lemonade was sour instead of fizzy, and the cream soda was the wrong colour..."

"And the chocolate tasted so odd. Do you remember, the first time Dad brought us home a Hershey Bar and we thought there was something wrong with it, we got Mum to taste it because we thought it had gone off?" Pris's eyes sparkled at the memory. It was a fun game for her, do you remember this, do you remember that.

"Oh god, that was awful. Do you remember the day we discovered that if we went out to Jackson Heights, the Indian shops actually sold Crunchies and Dairy Milk?"

"Oh, and when Mum actually got Auntie Beth to post over a Care Package full of Bird's Eye custard and Beanos, so that you could have a proper party for your tenth birthday?"

"Mmmmm, Custard and sticky toffee pudding," I reminisced, my eyes misting over as I wondered how quickly I could give up on my roast vegetables and just skip straight to pudding.

"So you're going to be 25 in a week," she reminded me.

"Oh god, don't remind me." I felt so, so, utterly, anciently old, feeling that deadline staring me in the face.

Pricilla, and the rest of the immediate family, knew all about The Deal and when it was supposed to end. "With your girlfriend touring her first album, and you working A&R for her, you are never going to quit that job at Windlass, are you?"

I shook my head forlornly, and wished we could have gone somewhere that served alcohol. The smell of mushy peas reminded me horribly of grammar school, and I felt uncomfortably like a child. "It's not just Deltawave. My own band is so, so super-close to putting out a record. Three Square have finally confirmed the single release for mid October, and we're doing a 2-week tour to support it. We're so close, I can taste it. If that doesn't put us over the top, then nothing will. It's just not fair that my birthday can't come a month later."

"Danny, I'm on your side, really I am." The waitress poured another round of tea, and I pushed my vegetables listlessly around my plate as Pricilla bent to drink, then brightened. "I've got a suggestion of my own. I've got _news_ of my own. I've enrolled to start an MBA at Columbia Business School."

Our eyes locked and suddenly I saw the entire plan unfolding just the way my sister conceived it. There was only one reason for Pricilla's sudden interest in business school; she was after my job, my inheritance, my life. "No!" I insisted. "No way! You can not do that." I had been almost about to blurt out, _I am not going to let you do that_ , but realised my sister would completely freak out at anything that looked like an attempt to control her life, especially coming from me. (That was what our parents were for.)

"Come on, Danny, it makes sense, really it does. You don't want that job, you never have. And if someone has to take over the family firm, it might as well be me."

"No way, no fucking way. How can you even think of quitting Vogue after all the time you've spend building up a reputation and a portfolio?" I didn't feel it necessary to mention that actually, maybe I _had_ started to want the job, once I realised that Merry might actually be prepared to marry a super-wealthy accountant when she wasn't prepared to marry a starving guitarist. But mostly, I just didn't want my sister taking away that chance, that life line, that safety net from me.

"Print media is dying," Pricilla confided. "Maybe not immediately, but it will soon. The internet is going to eat it alive. Five years ago, none of the major fashion magazines even had websites. Now they all do. And no one has the slightest clue how to make money from them. They just see them as static adverts for the print magazines; they've got no fucking clue what's about to hit them."

I chewed one of my roasties thoughtfully as I stared at her, then swallowed uneasily. I had only recently got onto the Internet. I had an email account at work, and used my connection mostly to check out which up and coming bands were getting discussed on alt.music.alternative. "So why don't you get a job as a designer or something for those interweb sites."

She shook her head slowly. "I love couture, but I'd rather be a collector than anything else. You can do that if you're working at Vogue, because of the freebies. But not on a computer programmer's salary. I'd need serious money. The kind of money I'd be making running Dad's firm."

I stared at her petulantly, chewing at the chapped skin on my bottom lip. There was a part of me that just wanted to shout at her the way I'd shouted at her for stealing my lego when I was 6 and she was 7 and a half. _But that job was supposed to be mine_. She was right, though. I did not want it. I had just come to rely on it, even just the thought of it, as a lifeboat for if and when my music career crashed. "So you don't really want the job either."

"I want it," she told me. "Accountancy, I can drag kicking and screaming into the internet age. The amount of money that's churning around online... have you ever heard of eCommerce?" 

I shook my head but smirked. "I think Merry and I might have seen them at The Spiral last month?" It was the kind of joke that Merry would have thought hilarious, and would have lead to a tiny competition between us to come up with the most shitty _Spiral_ bandname.

"You're hopeless," Pricilla complained, shocking me out of my memories, as she shovelled mushy peas into her mouth. Mushy peas were the one thing that I had been glad to leave back in the Hampstead of our childhood; the smell really did turn my stomach, even without a hangover. "You live in a complete fantasy world, I don't know how Merry puts up with you."

"Merry lives in the same fantasy world," I shrugged, then suddenly stared off into the chintzy wallpaper, realising something profound about my own girlfriend for the first time. That was exactly why we worked together so well; Merry was the first girl to not just understand, but want to join in my fantasy world. Back in my _carrying guitars to class_ days, when I'd told girls that my ultimate dream was to go on Top Of The Pops, most girls had just laughed at me. Merry was the first girl who had ever looked back at me, eyes huge, and said 'Oh my god, my dream is to go on Top Of The Pops, too!'

My sister's voice, sharp, interrupted my thoughts. "Look, I'm doing you a favour, really."

I shifted in my chair and grumbled, "Steal my birthright, and call it a favour... Thanks, Esau!"

"It was Jacob," she corrected, in that prissy Big Sister voice, just to show that she, unlike me, had paid attention in Sunday School. "Come on, li'l brother. It takes the pressure off you. It gives you your extra month. You can release your little record, do your little tour, with your little band..." 

I hated being patronised like that, and the 18 months between us really started to sting. But then thinking about my 'little tour' that I had spent months setting up, and the little record that I had been negotiating for even longer, something clicked in the back of my head. "Pris, there is no way that you just waltzed into Columbia Business School last weekend, when you heard I was getting married, and got accepted to start an MBA in the Fall. How long have you been planning this? Weeks? Months?"

She made a delicate face, as if realising she'd just been caught. "Yeah, months. When you started saying that Merry was going to get signed, I knew there was no way that you were going to leave the music industry."

I sighed deeply, then closed my eyes and tried to think about it. Really, it would be easier without the headache pounding behind my eyes, but this was my fault really. When I opened my eyes, I decided not to fight it any more. She was right. It was a gift. I had asked only for a month, but I had received the rest of my life instead. Reaching out across the table, I took my sister's hand in my own, and squeezed it gently. "OK, Pris. I support you in this. Good luck, I sincerely mean that. And..." Pricilla was now biting her lip, holding back tears, and it struck me suddenly how much we looked alike, both small and thin with curly brown hair, big round cheekbones and puckered cupids bow lips. "Pris, thank you. From the bottom of my heart."

"OK," she agreed, finally able to exhale. "Now call Mum and arrange your birthday dinner, or you know we'll just end up at the 21 Club again."

"I kinda like the 21 Club," I shrugged. "It's a bit of a birthday tradition. And fuck knows their vegetables are a lot fresher than this." I gave up on my cauliflower and started just dipping my roasties into the cheese sauce.

My parents took it pretty well, considering, when I sheepishly explained my decision to stay on at Windlass, albeit after waiting for Pricilla to drop her big announcement. By the time she had finished enthusing about how much this degree would help her when it came to the family business, they had already figured it out, and my father turned to me with sad but resigned eyes, and politely enquired if that meant I was planning on staying in the music industry. And I realised with a start that I hadn't even got round to telling my parents that I had transferred the to the A&R Department, let alone that I had now been promoted up to a Class 2 salary, same as the other junior A&Rs. It was just as well I was making the extra money, as my father sighed and told me with a disappointed tone, that although he was proud of his son for the success (even though he didn't understand it) that the extra few hundred dollars a month to make up the shortfall on my apartment would no longer be forthcoming. Oh, and he would be cancelling the family credit card in my name, so no more last minute guitar string purchases at Sam Ash. Then he called the waiter and ordered the customary bottle of Dom Perignon to toast the birthday boy with, with impeccable timing, almost as if to drive the point home that it wasn't even about the money, it was about the principle of the thing. Cut off, not with a shilling, but a champagne glass.

It would be fine, really. It meant that I could no longer bankroll the band in quite the same fashion I had, before, and the other boys would have to start pulling their weight. But we were almost, _almost_ , to the point where our band was actually starting to pay for itself, rather than being an expensive hobby, especially on out of town gigs where we were starting to fetch a guarantee.


	14. Impediment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After endless wrangling with Three Square, Metropolis finally release their first single, _Impediment_ , with an accompanying video, then embark a tiny, two-week American tour.
> 
> But in the exhausting rush of trying to promote Deltawave, and trying to promote his own band, has Daniel made a mistake that, while it proves incredibly fortunate for his band, could end up costing him his job?

With Merry out on tour, it was time to reclaim my life, and throw myself back into my band. I'd got too lazy, too comfortable, staying in to snuggle with her under the blankets when I should have been out at rehearsals or out pounding the streets, preaching the Metropolis gospel to anyone who would listen. My sister's news had been the wake-up call, the kick up the ass that I'd needed. With Merry out of my apartment for nearly two months, it was time to put my nose back to my own grindstone, instead of pushing hers. It was time to make my own band happen.

The single, so much rested on our single. Charlie had sulked for a month over the argument about Jezebel, until I had ferried over the final mixes of our finished tracks, hand delivering them personally to Charlie's apartment in Canarsie so he couldn't pretend he hadn't received them. The single was too good, even Charlie couldn't hold out for the sake of his principles. All four band members, and Charlie had listened to the 4 tracks, and we all agreed that _Impediment_ was the one to push. 

So when I ran into Mandy at Katz's Deli, rather surprised, to be honest, that she hadn't gone along on the Deltawave tour either, I bought her a sandwich and asked if we could talk business for a bit.

"I've always really admired the projections that you did for the Down Time. Do you think you could possibly be persuaded to make a video for Metropolis?" It was a bit of an underhanded question, as I already knew that she had wanted to make the video for the first Deltawave single, and had been piqued that she hadn't even been asked. What she didn't know was that it wasn't actually me or Bebe that had refused to shortlist her, it was actually Elisha, but I knew I couldn't tell her that. Getting between the sheets of other artists' collaborations, when they were in a relationship, yeah, that was a bad idea.

"What kind of budget do you have?" she asked coolly.

"Well, it's certainly not going to be a Windlass size budget, but we can cough up something." I still had my birthday money, after all. My mother had managed not to skimp on that. "In the realm of about $2000?"

She made a face. "That's going to be pretty basic. You're lucky that I already have a digital camera, and access to editing equipment - there's no way you can do film for that price - but hiring a location? Lighting rig? Have you thought about all that."

I rather thought it was the director's job to think about all that, but I kept my mouth shut and instead thought through my options. "We could do it at the Lacuna, I'm sure they'd love the publicity. Charlene loves Metropolis. We single-handedly pay their wholesale liquor bill for the week every time we play."

"The light in there is terrible," she observed. "You'd need some heavy duty lighting equipment. I don't have that kind of gear."

"I'll see what I can rustle up from friends at NYU. We need something cheap, but we do need something good, classy." I paused, wondering if I could sweeten the pot a bit. "You know if you get some more music videos on your show reel, I can put you forward for some Windlass commissions, and those will pay well."

"Are you bribing me?"

"If that's what it takes." I flashed her what he hoped was a disarming smile, chasing my dill pickle around my plate with my knife.

She narrowed her eyes and considered me. "It would have been better if you'd just let me do the video for the first Deltawave single."

I watched her carefully, trying to think how much to say. There was a huge part of me that was tempted to just think _bombs away, just spit it out - your boyfriend didn't even want you on the shortlist_ \- but there was a far more astute part of me that really wanted her for another Deltawave video, if they ever got the chance to make one. For a long minute, there was silence, as we sipped our root beers and finished our sandwiches. But just as I was getting nervous, and was about to drop my bomb, she spoke.

"Alright, Daniel, I'll do it. We'll see what I can scrape together for $2000. But don't forget, you owe me now."

We shook on it, and I said I'd get her a cashier's cheque for $1000 up front once she came up with a treatment, with the other half payable on delivery (I was learning so much from working at Windlass, that was for sure) and we parted after exchanging phone numbers.

And somehow, over the next two weeks, we managed to pull together a decent video on that tiny shoestring of a budget. I hassled Doyle to get a fucking haircut, pressured Dieter into shaving the child molester moustache, and forcibly parted Dick from the ugly trilby. My band looked good again, looked as good as we sounded. Mandy shot some live footage one afternoon at the Lacuna, on black and white film that was light sensitive enough for us to get away with the minimal stage lights that Charlene had rounded up for us. 

I always thought that shooting a video would be all glamourous and exciting, like a film set, but it was actually weirdly stressful. Mandy only had one camera, so we had to play the song over and over again, carefully miming to the track synched up to the camera, each time with the camera focused on us from a different angle. She would cut the various takes together during the editing process, to make it look like we'd had a whole film crew. Although I wanted to dance about with my usual energy, Mandy had taped out markings on the floor that we were not allowed to step over, or we would go out of focus. And it was hard to concentrate, as even with the minimal lights, it was fucking hot on that stage, and after 2 or 3 takes, I felt myself melting, and had to go off and towel my face off and fix my hair where it was curling with sweat.

And when Mandy came in close to shoot my guitar for the close-ups, I could not understand why she focused on my right hand, my picking hand, which wasn't even doing anything interesting, as opposed to my fretting hand, where all the action happened. "If you really want to capture what I do, you should shoot my left hand. That's where my impressive fingering technique lies."

"Save it for Merry," snickered Doyle, flicking his hair out of his eyes, and I shot him a glare.

But Mandy just looked at me like I was nuts. "I don't give a shit about guitar technique. Filming your right hand gives a better shot from a compositional point of view, with a more interesting frame, and if I shoot at the correct angle, I can get your face in, too. No, don't look directly at the camera! Look out as if you're looking at the audience."

"But I never look at the audience," I complained. "I find it way too nerve wracking to look at the audience."

"Well, look at your guitar or look at your shoes, but don't look at me or the camera, you'll ruin my shot."

Doyle, however, was allowed to look at the camera, though it took some coaxing. "The camera is your audience," she told him, as he kept glancing shyly away. "Whatever performance you're used to giving onstage, you've got to give it all, with your eyes, right here." She pointed into the shiny glass gullet of the lens. But Doyle was shy and standoffish with the camera, gazing at it suspiciously from under long, blond eyelashes, if he looked at it at all.

It was Dieter in the end, who dominated the video, looking the camera straight in the eye and smirking, seducing it with his direct gaze, licking his thin lips and raising his eyebrows. Emotions flickered across his face like a trained actor, a hint of vulnerability followed by that triumphant smirk of confidence, a tiny bit of challenge in his flared nostrils. I noticed that Mandy didn't tell him not to look directly at the camera, in fact, she moved in close as she filmed his cameos, and when she lowered the camera from her shoulder, I could see that she was actually blushing slightly.

Then she took the whole mess home and processed it heavily, boosting the contrast and colouring the backgrounds red so that we stuck out like bold cartoon characters against it. It was a cliche, I knew it, that red and black colour scheme, but still, it suited the bold, slicing music of the song. Naughtily, I slipped it in with a batch of videos for duplication at Windlass, and posted 20 copies off about the East Coast to cable access channels in the cities we would be playing in.

And then, on a beautiful bright day, when the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the birds were singing, the single arrived. No fanfare, no star-studded record release party - OK, well, maybe a few celebratory drinks at the Lacuna Lounge when the cases of CDs turned up at my flat - but there it was. My very first single, on CD and cherry red 7" vinyl. My hands shook as I actually took it out of the box, holding it up to show my bandmates as we assembled in the front booth of the Lacuna.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I announced portentously. "A star is born."

Doyle and Dick and Effie and Jess, and even Charlene over at the bar all burst into applause, whooping wildly, but Dieter stared at the CD, taking it from me and peering at it suspiciously. "What the fuck is this?" he demanded, pointing at the cover.

"It's our single, Dieter, it's the culmination of our life's work," Doyle said, though his excitement ran right over any sarcastic tone he had intended to direct at our bassist.

"No, I mean, what the fuck is _this_?" Dieter stabbed an angry finger at the front, at a large yellow band across the top of the single's cover, which declared THREE SQUARE RECORDS in larger letters than either the name of the band or the title of the record. "I worked so carefully on the artwork, I deliberately chose the colour scheme and the font and the artwork, and even our photos, to emphasise the entire Metropolis aesthetic, and then Charlie just goes and stamps this ugly, yellow... atrocity over the top of it?"

"For once, please, can you just not do this, Dieter?" I found myself begging. I'd been through enough arguments already with Three Square over the promotion, the distribution, even the press copies of the damn single, as if Charlie didn't actually want any reviews in Alternative Press or the Village Voice or even Maximum Rock'N'Roll.

"But he's right, their logo is bigger than our name," Dick pointed out. Oh, don't let Dick join in on the prima donna shit, he was usually the sensible one of us.

"There's always record company logos on records," I explained. "Windlass stick their logos on the record, MVC stick their logo on the record, even Musketeer stick their logos on records. If you're really into music, you care about the label. I know I do."

"Windlass always put their logo on the back," Dieter insisted. "As do MVC and Destructive and 4AD."

"Come on, 4AD totally put their logos on the front," Doyle countered. "You can spot a 4AD record a mile off."

"They don't, you know. It's just that their in-house designers, Envelope 23, have such a unified design aesthetic you automatically know a 4AD record when you see one. Their logo stays on the back," Dieter explained.

"Musketeer," Doyle volunteered. "Musketeer always have their logos on the front. I know that I've certainly bought records just because of that distinctive Musketeer logo."

"Musketeer logos are always on the spine. Come on, you of all people should know that," Dieter sneered, continuing to tap the offending yellow bar on the single.

 _For fucks sake, why did Dieter have to make such a big deal out of it? Was he just intent on ruining everything?_ I thought to myself, but knew better than to provoke him by saying it aloud. "Musketeer logos are really cool, anyway," I offered diplomatically. "I've got a T-shirt with the Musketeer logo on it. Well... at least I used to." Across the table, Doyle looked vaguely guilty, pulling his jacket closed to cover some article of clothing he'd probably borrowed and never returned after all those months he'd slept on my couch. "Come on, it's our single, guys. The least you could do is act excited."

"It doesn't strike you as at all ironic?" Dieter drawled, refusing to let the point go. "How much Charlie fed us that whole bullshit about branding and selling out, and how he can't even listen to a Jezebel record, because it just sounds like _marketing_? Well, I don't know what marketing sounds like, but I sure know what it looks like." He tapped the Three Square logo yet again, and I, reluctantly, found myself agreeing, somewhat against my will.

"I agree with you, man, but just let it go," I said very quietly, hating the look of triumph in Dieter's eyes. "Come on, who wants one? Each of us gets 5 free copies to keep or give to our friends or whoever, but after that, everybody has to pay at least the wholesale price, so think very carefully about who to give them to." And with that, I picked up a copy and ceremonially carried it over to Charlene, to set up above the cash register in the tiny but growing shrine to Lacuna bands.

 

\----------

 

Then came the tour. I was shitting myself. There was so much money riding on this, even though I had cut corners at every opportunity, even borrowing Deltawave's van off Mandy in exchange for paying for a tune-up, instead of renting our own. I'd carefully co-ordinated everything, pulling double shifts at work to cover both Deltawave's promotion, and promoting my own band at the same time, then arranged for a colleague in Germany to take over looking after Merry and company for the two weeks I was away. It would be easier, anyway, as her band were flying to Berlin for most of that period, better to have someone on the ground there.

My first tour. I threw up twice the morning before we left, though I hadn't had a drop to drink yet, and I didn't even get car sickness. It was just sheer nerves, and I made Dick pull over again on the interstate to let me be sick, but there was nothing left in the pit of my stomach. Dieter complained, as Dieter complained about everything from gas station food to the van's bumpy suspension, but still we got to Philly ahead of schedule. After a few nights, Dick and I had load-in and load-out down to a science, working out the order in which everything had to go into and out of the van in order to maximise the space, then form a human chain so that nothing was ever unattended. I had heard so many nightmare stories of bands getting equipment stolen on tour, so there was no way I was risking it with our gear. Dick usually drove to the gigs, but he invariably got wasted after the show - but thank god it was only _after_ the show - so Doyle usually ended up driving back to the motel, or wherever we were staying. Of course, they all complained about how I would not leave any of the guitars in the vans overnight, and brought them in with us, even if it meant sleeping with a guitar case for a pillow, but we made it through that tour with our equipment intact.

I had actually procured a Cell Phone, borrowed off one of the other A&R assistants at Windlass. I'd printed off a massive thick binder of a "tour itinerary" (again, I had learned so many valuable tips at Windlass) with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every venue, every motel, every college radio station that we were hitting along the way. It was exhausting being both the lead guitarist, and also the de facto tour manager, but I didn't trust any of my bandmates to do it, and we hadn't been able to afford to pay anyone to do it properly. Sure, OK, we could have taken one of our scene mates along, and Fab did ask if we needed a roadie, but honestly, he would be one more mouth to feed and one more drain on our limited riders. I kept asking for food, instead of drink, but invariably the tiny backstages would contain a few bags of potato crisps and cans of cheap lager.

The club in Baltimore, however, fed us at the cafe that was attached. And in DC, one of the musicians in our support band offered to let us stay in the loft over his garage, so we didn't have to spring for a hotel. Some of the support bands were really, really super-nice, like they went out of their way to make us feel welcome - or maybe they were just buttering us up for a New York gig, as Dieter so uncharitably suggested. Other support bands could be weird, touchy, with that odd mixture of defensiveness and aggression, like they were going out of their way to prove that we weren't such a big deal, just because we came from out of town - even though we'd never suggested such a thing in the first place, it was entirely projection. I mean, one support band actually made fun of me for having a _towel_ in my luggage, like, had they never even travelled, let alone gone on tour?

To be honest, bathing daily became a constant struggle. At a venue in a converted church, I was delighted to discover a capacious backstage with an actual shower. At that point, an actual bathroom backstage was, to me, way, way better than a shitty rider of beer. I mean, come on. Four sweaty guys in the back of a van; I knew we all did our best to keep clean, but it was a struggle sometimes, and not to pick on anyone in particular, but Jesus Christ, did Doyle sweat perhaps a bit excessively. So on spotting any kind of backstage shower, I didn't even tell the rest of the band, I immediately high-tailed it back to the van to fetch my suitcase. When I emerged, squeaky clean for the first time in days, I found the three of my bandmates queued up outside the bathroom, towels slung over their shoulders.

"Please tell me he's not used up all the hot water?" grumbled Dieter as Dick slipped in ahead of him.

Another of the clubs tried to stiff us, and offered us only half our guarantee, but I whipped out my phone and my business card from Windlass records, and told the guy that Windlass records would never send another artist their way ever again, if they didn't pay up. Fortunately, the man didn't call my bluff, and just paid up, but I hoped that I never had to do that again.

In Atlanta, Doyle came back from asking where to park the van, coughing and trying to hold his nose. "Oh, man, that club is a fucking toilet," he panted, as he flopped around, gasping for air.

"All clubs are toilets at this level," I sighed, leafing through my tour itinerary. "We need to get hooked up as a support band for a bigger artist."

"No, I mean it's a literal toilet," Doyle countered. "The john in the back has overflowed, there's piss and shit all over the dressing room."

We played anyway, dowsing our clothes with cologne to try and blot out the stench, and delivered a blinder of a set to a few dozen kids too busy smoking to notice the sewage.

But it was the stretches of boredom that most surprised me. Twenty-three hours a day of waiting around, in motels, in the van, backstage, and then the rush of those 45 sharp, focused minutes of pure adrenaline excitement that we got onstage. The gigs were over in the blink of an eye - sometimes the support bands were good enough to watch, but mostly they weren't. And then there was the rest of the day to be got through. Those long, endless drives, packed into the back of the van, Dick driving and Doyle fiddling with the radio, blasting out whatever dreadful local classic rock station he could find. I begged him to let me put something on the tape deck, but that meant another argument about who got to choose the tape. With four stereo nazis with four very distinct tastes in music, man, the arguments we could get into were ferocious. Finally, I drew up a rota, that we would go round in alphabetical order - me, then Dick, then Dieter, then Doyle - and pick one, and only one album that the rest of the band would listen to without complaining. Well, at least, I tried to be open minded about Dieter's terrible Industrial music or Doyle's hip-hop. Dieter, his legs casually draped across the back seat to stop anyone sitting next to him, nose buried in a doorstop of a book, would scoff openly if I dared to put on my favourite Spacemen 3 album, complaining that it was 40 minutes of one chord and fart noises. (Not to mention that Dick soon claimed veto rights - fair enough as he was driving - but funnily enough, he only ever exercised them on Dieter's Neubauten tapes.)

But Dieter was lucky in that he could at least read in a tiny, cramped moving vehicle like that. Once or twice, I made the mistake of asking him what his book was about. He didn't even raise his eyes from the page. "Godel, Escher Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid."

"Any good? What's it about?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"Try me," I demanded. After all, I had got better grades than him at NYU, even if I didn't know what autotelic meant.

Dieter raised one devilish eyebrow and dragged his gaze away from the text, rolling his eyes at the imposition. "Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, as examined in metaphor through contrasting the work of Lewis Carroll, Bach and M.C. Escher. It's a quite fascinating intertextual journey through the origins of artificial intelligence..."

OK, really, he was just taking the piss. I shot him a glare then turned back to the front seat, to find that Doyle had disappeared into a Gameboy. And it was still how many hundred miles to the next show? Somehow touring didn't feel quite like all it was cracked up to be.

The South got a bit hairy. After a show in Tennessee that turned out to be playing in the promoter's basement to a couple hundred sweaty and excited teenagers who screamed their heads off and danced like they were possessed, our van got pulled over by cops on the way to our crash pad. The officers made Doyle walk back and forth along a yellow line repeatedly until another car turned up with a breathalyser, which, fortunately, he managed to pass. Frustrated by his sobriety, the cops started to search the van, and for a nerve-wracking few minutes, I was terrified that they might unearth some ancient roach belonging to Deltawave. But before they could pull up the carpet over the wheel wells, a report of a robbery in progress crackled over their police radio, and they reluctantly left us to drive, shaken but without a criminal record, to our hosts' house, where we slept in a barn above a row of softly swishing cows.

Girls in the South were friendly, though, and both Dieter and Doyle started to develop habits of sloping off, promising to call my cell phone in the morning to have us pick them up at some random dorm or shared house. Dick and I, both practically-married men, tutted our tongues and shook our heads, but still, both of us were grateful for fewer bodies in motel room beds, or crushed on the floors of shared crash pads between incredible record collections and bowls of dried-out cat food.

We had only taken two crates of CDs with us, and we had already sold one of them and were working our way through the second, less than a week into the two-week tour. That was good, I was convinced, especially as I had no idea what Three Square were doing with the distribution, as half the record shops in towns we were actually playing didn't even have a single copy of the damned CD. But when I called Charlie to harangue him about it, Charlie swore up and down that he had sent at least half a dozen CDs to every town on the route, along with posters and promotional materials. I checked the next shop, and yes, there was a poster on the wall, the four of us slumped against the dark bar of the Lacuna, the familiar red and black colour scheme, with the words Metropolis: Impediment across the top in red neon, but nothing of ours in the M section. Feeling like a knob, I went over and asked the manager.

Metropolis? Sold the lot, he told me, and did I happen to know where he could get any more because they had been playing the video on MTV Buzz Bin and it was selling like hotcakes.

MTV Buzz Bin? I felt myself get kinda warm under the collar, even as I put in another call to Charlie to ask what the hell was going on. I knew exactly how much it normally cost to get a band onto Buzz Bin, and there was no way Charlie had that kind of cash. Charlie, of course, played dumb, but promised to keep an eye out. And as I made my way back to the van and told the guys to head to the motel, I felt myself sweating bullets, and not just from the Georgia heat. I had collected the 20 video copies from duplication and posted them out with my own cash. A couple of demos now and then was fine, but I wasn't stupid enough to try and scam the shipping for 20 videos. But had I ever retrieved my master copy back from the duplication room? Or had my video just gone over to MTV in the normal batch of DGI's new release videos? I racked my brains but I could not remember.

Nonetheless, we all piled into the motel room, which advertised 58 channels of cable TV - mostly porn, if the couple banging loudly in the room next door were any indication - and waited for Buzz Bin to come on. First it played the new video from Dead Letters, the big draw to get people watching. And then I felt a sucker punch to the gut as the next clip came on. Merry's face filled the screen, her hair swinging back and forth in time with a lazy trip-hop beat before the camera switched to Elisha, then cut to the narrative of the expensively filmed story arc. _Autotelic_. I didn't really know why it hit me so hard; it wasn't like I hadn't seen it before, back in the Listening Room of Windlass. And yet it affected me more, somehow, out there in this shitty motel in the midst of nowhere, while Merry was off in Germany somewhere. I missed her, suddenly, and keenly, like a burning sensation working its way through my chest, missed not just the sight of her, dancing in the back of the video, her face turned away from the camera as she grooved with Gabe, but the vanilla-coconut oil smell of her hair, the feel of her skin, the tinkle of her throaty laugh, the sensation of her hand on my waist as she pushed past me in our tiny galley kitchen.

The song finished, and an ad break blared out, too loud, too bright after the moody, atmospheric drift of _Autotelic_. It was the wrong song to have lead with, my A &R brain said, it didn't stick in the head like _Shame_ , the single Bebe and I had chosen. But my lover brain could not let go of those pictures of Merry. It was too weird seeing her on MTV, and then seeing girls in bikinis playing volleyball advertising light beer brands.

And suddenly Doyle whooped. A familiar staccato guitar riff rang out across the room, followed by a machine gun drum pattern. The screen, black at first, filled with red, the red resolved into the outlined background of my own head and guitar, bouncing back and forth as I wrung the riff from my Epiphone. The colours reversed, and now a blood red Dieter was shaking against a black background as Doyle's rich baritone rang out through the motel room. "Oh, babycakes, speak now, or forever hold your peace, hold your tongue or tell me, tell me your imp-p-p-pediment." Jesus fucking Christ, even on a tiny motel television screen, this looked fucking great. I felt my heart swell with pride as I watched my own band flash and weave across the screen. We looked fantastic, sharp and energetic and totally hip, perfect clothes, perfect hair, perfect riffs, the band I had wanted to be in since I was 10. Dieter's gaze, on film, didn't just seduce the camera, it fucked it sideways and left it in a tangled heap, begging for more.

The room was utterly silent, except for the ominous squeaking of the bed next door, while the video played, as we stared, open-mouthed, at the screen. But the minute it ended, the four of us exploded into whoops and yells, even as I moved forward to check the credits that flashed up before the program went into the Rocket Pops' new video. Metropolis: Impediment. Three Square Records (DGI Distribution) Director: Amanda Goldblatt.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. It must have gone out with the DGI promotional packages by mistake. This had to be the kind of offence that I could get fired for. I wondered if I should even bother turning up for work, or if I was going to get an irate phone call from Bebe at any moment. Or what if it was not even Bebe; what if I got called on the carpet by one of the big Directors, and made to repay the money, oh fuck, there was no way I could repay that, and it would take me years to make it back out of overtime. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

"Oh my god," whooped Dick. "We are on MT fucking V. This is the best moment of my fucking life." Doyle picked up the phone to ring Effie to tell her the news, and even Dieter actually looked _impressed_ , for the first time in his fucking life. But I was still shitting myself, wondering if I would even have a job to come back to when the tour was over.

After two weeks of touring, having driven as far as Florida and played two gigs in Miami, we turned the van around and headed for home. It would take a couple of days of dedicated driving, with Dick and Doyle taking shifts so we didn't have to stop, to get us back to New York. But after 12 gigs, 3 college radio shows, and half a dozen interviews with local papers, whether over the crackling cell phone from the back of the van, or in a cafe before the gig, we returned home having sold every single CD we had taken with us. Oh, and Dieter had actually finished reading that insane doorstop of a book about zen computing or whatever, and was now dishing out inscrutable zen adages about whether any of our interviewers were actually conscious, but hey. Horses for courses. We played one last gig, on a Sunday night in Boston, and then it was back to reality.

The first thing I did when I got in to work, early enough for the phone rates to still be low, was ring Merry in Berlin, looking up the number of her hotel on the tour itinerary I had so carefully planned for them. The phone rang twice, three times... finally she picked up. "Hello?"

"Merry, I may not have much time, but if I get sacked from Windlass, just remember that I daw you."

"I daw you too, but why on earth would you get sacked?" she laughed, and my heart grew warm at the amusement in her voice. "They love you over here, man, everyone in the Berlin office is half in love with that _efficient young man in New York_."

"Never mind," I sighed. Any minute Bebe was going to walk in to the empty office, and I wanted to stretch the phone call out as long as I could. "How is it going out there?"

"It's going really well. London was a blast... oh my god, Danny! I met Graham Cooper!"

A tiny stab of jealousy, even though I'd said it was OK. Wait, no, it was envy more than it was jealousy. I had met loads of intense local support bands on the road, and collected half a dozen awesome demo tapes, but no one on the level of Graham Cooper. "Did you shag him, then?"

"Danny!" she shrieked, then burst into laughter. "Of course I didn't shag him. He has a Swedish girlfriend who is very nice. He is a total sweetheart, though; he is so nice. Like, surprisingly nice, compared to how he comes off in the press." She paused. "I wonder if the British press just makes everyone ten times nastier like the camera supposedly puts ten pounds on you."

"That bad, huh. Did you get the cover of NME?"

"No, but we got a pretty decent feature. That was cool. Select might still give us a cover, but they want to lead with with my picture, and you can imagine how Ely took that."

"Uh-huh. Oh boy, have I not missed Elisha," I agreed, almost under my breath, though I did not want to get caught back up into the Elisha Drama again, I wanted her to ask about _my_ tour.

"How did your tour go?" she asked, as if she'd read my mind.

"Brilliant," I told her, and launched into a ten-minute recap of all the highlights, the gigs, the problems, the record stores, finishing it off with my triumphant story of seeing both our videos on MTV. Up until that point she had giggled along, and asked questions and gasped with excitement at appropriate parts, but then she suddenly fell silent. "Isn't that great?" I pushed, suddenly feeling like I needed the reassurance. "Both of our videos are on MTV. Wouldn't you say that was fate, or something."

"I guess. But this is how it starts, isn't it? We see each other more on television than we do in person." She sounded so sad all of a sudden that I wished I could be there and just put my arms around her.

"Do you miss me as much as I miss you? I could see if I could get a flight out there, maybe meet you in Amsterdam... I don't have any holiday time left after the tour, but maybe if I could swing it as a business trip... I could expense it in that case..."

"No, don't. It'll just make things harder when you have to go home. Look, this is what I was afraid of. I have been having an absolutely great time in London and Berlin, it's been a total party, and absolutely amazing."

"Oh, and I'm super sure meeting Graham Cooper didn't hurt." I didn't mean for it to sound as sulky as it came out; I had tried to make it lighthearted, but I didn't feel lighthearted at that moment.

"Oh, leave it out, Danny. Graham Cooper in person is not actually as hot as you are, believe it or not. He smells weird, like an old man. Like he's been mothballed somehow. But forget Graham Cooper. The thing, is I've been having a great time in Berlin. I love it here, it's so bohemian, the atmosphere is so cool, so relaxed. And you were having an amazing time on tour, don't even try to pretend you weren't, because I can hear it in your voice how much fun you had, and how hard you worked and how proud you are that it all went well. But now we're thinking about how long it's going to be until we can see one another again. And now we're both unhappy, and in time, that's going to make us resentful."

"I'm not resentful in the slightest," I lied. "I just wanted to tell you how cool I thought it was, that our videos were getting played back to back on MTV. If you want me to come out and meet you in Amsterdam next weekend, let me know. If you don't... I've got plenty to keep myself busy."

"I'll be home in, like, two, three weeks anyway."

"I thought you were coming home the week after next." I had made the arrangements myself, I was sure of it.

"Bebe and our manager agreed, the single has better momentum in Europe, so we're gonna stay another couple of weeks and play some more shows, maybe do some TV appearances. Oh, sweetie, don't sulk, please. I'll be back soon, and then we'll be together. At least until the next tour starts properly. It'll be easier to just see you then."

"You'll be staying at my house, right? When you come home?" I insisted, suddenly afraid of what else she hadn't bothered updating me on.

"I thought it was _our_ house now? At least that's what you told me?"

"Of course it is." I bit my fist and wished I hadn't said that. But there was the bustle of noise and motion as I heard Bebe sweep into her office behind me. "Shit! She's here... Gotta go..."

"Asheton, in my office, now," she barked, and I quickly rung off with Merry before tagging along into the office, terrified for the bollocking that was to come. She dropped her bags onto the corner table, then flopped down at her desk, looking up at me expectantly. Should I just confess, or should I let her pull it out of me? I opted for the latter. "Well?" she finally asked.

"Well what?"

"How was your tour, you ninny? You didn't expect you wouldn't have to give me a full report."

I breathed out, a sigh of relief. "It was really good, actually. Most gigs well attended, made our guarantee every night. Made a lot of really useful contacts in local press and college radio... oh, and we've nearly totally sold out of our EP already. Charlie's thinking of printing up another run."

"How many did he do in this run?"

"A thousand." I swallowed nervously. It had seemed an almost impossible number to sell when Charlie had first suggested it, but upon our return, when we'd asked for more copies to sell in Boston, Charlie had told us he only had two boxes left. Not even a full case. Two boxes.

Bebe shook her head slowly. "Amateur. I bet he couldn't even get them printed up fast enough to restock while you were on tour. Don't let him print another run, if there's only 1000, it will become a collector's item very quickly. Look for another label, one that knows what they're doing for your next release."

"A label like Windlass," I suggested, knowing I was pushing my luck. But if we signed with Windlass, the plugger's fee would go straight on our account; I would be off the hook for Buzz Bin.

"You know I can't sign you, Daniel. Conflict of interest. You knew that the moment you got a job in A&R." I suddenly felt my job tighten around me like an iron noose. I had never really thought this part through when I had blustered into her office and asked for the job. "Oh, and Daniel?" She looked up, over the top of her rimless spectacles, with almost a malevolent expression of glee. Then she rummaged in one of her drawers, extracted a videotape and held it out to me. "Next time you decide to get some of your videos copied on the sly, be sure and pick up the original so Eric doesn't have to drop it off in my inbox? There's a good lad."

I stared at the video, trying to make sense of it. So if this video was here, in her inbox, how on earth had it ended up on MTV? So it hadn't gone out in the plugger's batch. At least I wasn't on the hook for the fee. But how on earth had it got to them? "Bebe, how..." No, I didn't dare ask.

Bebe looked up, her eyes twinkling like a little girl's. "Did you enjoy my little surprise, then?"

" _You_ gave it to MTV," I stuttered.

She nodded slyly. "Well, I had to get a broadcast quality version off Amanda, but... it was good to talk to Amanda anyway. That girl's got a lot of talent. We've got her on board to potentially do the next Deltawave video."

And finally I exhaled, feeling relief running through me from head to toe. I was off the hook for the fee, that was the main thing. And I had somehow made good on the favour that I owed Mandy. Thanking whatever English gods my family had failed to instil in me, I grasped the video tightly and sloped back out to my desk before my run of good luck expired.

So it was back to the grindstone with both bands. I was working really hard on Deltawave, pushing them harder in the States to try to give Merry some incentive to come home. But the awkward thing was, I found, slowly, that I didn't actually like their new manager. At first, I had been relieved not to have to deal with Elisha any more, and found Michael refreshingly professional and calm. But I didn't _trust_ Michael - not that you were supposed to trust anyone in the music industry, really - not on a professional level, but even less on a personal level. Michael, it came to be quite obvious, seemed to resent my relationship with Merry.

The NME issue that Merry had mentioned in her phone call finally turned up in the post. I had a subscription - for work, of course - but it could take up to a week for the thing to make its way over to New York in the parcel post. Deltawave hadn't got the cover, that was true, but there was a good sized photo of them on the index page, with Merry looking particularly bright-eyed and alluring as she perched on a newsdesk pretending to read a Zagat Guide. _The Deltawave Guide to New York City_ , it declared.

The article was really cute, interspliced with photos from that weekend in New York, Deltawave playing at the Mercury Lounge, eating at Katz's Deli, drinking coffee at The Pink Pony, and that ensemble photo in the front booth of the Lacuna Lounge. I could almost smell the Chinese laundry round the back. There was even a picture of Charlene behind the bar, posing with her arms crossed in front of the cash register as if to protect it, with the tiny shrine of Lacuna bands' records. Oh god, yes, there was the picture of Merry and me, looking like the coolest couple on earth, her long legs and perfect hair, and my proud grin and sharp suit. I scoured the text for any mentions of myself - oh yes, the NME had talked about Metropolis, bigging up both us and the scene nicely.

Merry's main squeeze, Daniel Asheton, plays guitar in hotly tipped New York combo, Metropolis, currently on tour of the States with their new single _Impediment_. Do the pressures of being one half of a NYC super-couple ever get to Merry? "Oh no, not at all. Daniel's very sweet and quite humble, so supportive. He pretty much engineered our record deal, in fact. But really, he is so amazingly super-talented, I'm just in awe of his abilities. Competition? Between us? Are you kidding? (laughs) He blows me away, hands down. Just wait till they get over here. They're an amazing band. You are in for such a treat when you see them."

I felt the colour rising to my face, pleased at her enthusiasm for me, though it did make me laugh to be described as humble. Humility was an aura that I very carefully cultivated, to put people off their guard, but underneath, I had more ambition in my little finger than all of Deltawave put together. I knew that I wasn't really supposed to treat the magazines as my own personal property, but there would always be more copies down in the press department, so I found a pair of scissors and cut out the photo of Merry and myself, making sure that I kept the bit of the article that contained the quote. Then I folded it so only our faces showed, and put it in my wallet, opposite a faintly terrible shot of the two of us squeezed into a photobooth together, just for good luck.

But I got the call from Michael halfway through the afternoon. "Daniel," he ventured, after an unctuous hello and a brief enquiry as to my health. "We have a little PR problem here. We are trying to position Merry as the focal point of the band. We deal in fantasies in this industry, you know that. And the biggest part of the fantasy, is that the beautiful girl - and indeed the beautiful boys - are, indeed, _available_. One half of a NYC super-couple is not _available_. Merry needs to not have a boyfriend."

"But Merry _has_ a boyfriend," I insisted, trying not to raise my voice. "Me."

"From now on, I am telling you, Merry does not have a boyfriend."

"Now wait. Merry and I have a relationship, we live together, we've talked about getting married. Merry has a boyfriend."

"I don't care what you two get up to when she's not working, or who she shags when she's on the road, but when she's doing television and interviews, and when she goes to meet and greets with industry and fans, she _does not have_ a boyfriend. Do I make myself clear?"

He must have made a phone call to Merry almost immediately after I put down the phone, because she rang back, her voice tight with emotion, only ten minutes later. "I don't care what Michael says," she insisted defiantly. "You and me, we are still a thing, even if I can't talk about you."

Relief flooded my brain, even if my resentment burned. "We are still together? No matter what?"

"Nothing changes, between you and me," Merry insisted. "I still daw you. No matter what."

"I totally daw you," I sighed, then frowned, working my thumb and forefinger across my brow. Another year of this and I would start to develop a semi-circular line worry line across the top of my nose, like my father. "You should sack that manager, though. This is not professional behaviour."

"Can't. He's Elisha's creature." She pronounced the word with such disdain that I burst out laughing.

"And I'm your creature. I will get Bebe onto him."

Bebe, however, to my great astonishment, actually agreed with Michael. "You two really do need to scale it back. You are too overinvolved in each others' professional lives right now. It's not healthy for the relationship and it's not healthy for either of your bands, especially Merry's."

"Not healthy for Merry's band? But she's the one with the major label contract, playing the London Astoria, and I'm the one still schlepping round indie clubs in the East Village."

"There are some things that you, as a man, will never be exposed to. And I am not exposing Merry to them, on your behalf."

"Like what." I folded my arms and waited for whatever feminist nonsense was to come. Bebe and my girlfriend were both way too keen on that whole man-hating girl power trip for my liking sometimes.

"From Marianne Faithful to Courtney Love, it is always women's careers that suffer when a famous musician boyfriend enters the picture. I am in favour of keeping your relationship out of the press, for now." With this, she sat down at her desk and made that dismissive gesture with her hand that meant it was time for me to scurry. "Don't question my wisdom on this, Asheton, it's just your pride, not your heart."

"Fuck _your_ pride," I muttered under his breath, though I knew better than to say it aloud.


	15. Supermodel? Do You Mean Superficial?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel finds Merry's new modelling dayjob as the "Face of Firbank" slightly disconcerting, to say the least.
> 
> But when Merry finally comes home from tour, Daniel worries that their lives have changed so much that they can no longer understand each other. And Merry's new choice for tour manager proves to be the flashpoint for an explosive argument.
> 
> Content Warning: transphobia and transmisogyny. Please note that the views expressed are those of the characters, not the author.

I was still fuming as I left the Windlass Building, and decided to walk the long blocks of Fifth Avenue up to Central Park to clear my head. The gaudy storefronts of the big, high-end shops always oddly cheered me, fashion houses and expensive jewellery stores. I dawdled along the sidewalk, gazing in the windows at Italian shoes and Dior Homme suits I could no longer afford to buy, but whose existence still made me strangely happy. And then I thought I saw Merry, out of the corner of my eye.

No, wait, that was absurd. Merry was in London, playing a sold out show at the Astoria and probably being toasted with Moet et Chandon by guitarists from Slur. But I couldn't shake the feeling that she was watching me. Then I crossed the road to gaze lovingly at a tray of engagement rings in Bulgari's window, and I saw it reflected in the glass. The entire top two floors of the Firbank shop window were a massive, black and white photo of Merry and Gabe.

For about ten minutes, I just stared, completely taken aback, overwhelmed with sense impressions of Merry. It was her, and yet not-her, blown up and made up and airbrushed - her tiny scar somehow vanished from her face. Her chest-length hair, blown up that large, looked like spun silk, and I found myself remembering her twice-weekly ritual of washing it. Every Monday and Thursday night, she would draw a bath, complaining that she couldn't rinse it properly in the shower, mix some weird concoction of baking soda, vinegar, honey, some other organic shit, and carefully lather it from scalp to end, working the mixture into her roots then sinking into the hot bath for exactly 20 minutes. Then she would emerge, wrapped in a bathrobe, and anoint herself with some mixture of sweet smelling oils, rose or almond or coconut. Sitting in the window, she would carefully blow-dry it for half an hour, then braid it for bed. Really, I preferred it when she came to bed with it loose, yellow hair cascading over my shoulders as she lay down, but she complained of knots in the morning. I had seen her, sitting on the sofa in the morning, giving it 50 strokes on each side with a soft bristled brush, her teeth gritting when she caught a snarl.

And then a tourist bumped into me, distracting me from my reverie and snapping me back into the real world, well, as much as the opulent displays of Fifth Avenue high-end consumerism were _real_. Firbank was a venerable British clothing house, known mostly for selling sturdy, sensible raincoats to the Royal Family, but they were making a play for the fashion crowd with their clean, classy updates of Edwardian glamour. And Merry and Gabe were perfect for that image, looking like a pair of hip aristocrats strolling down the Kings Road, Gabe appearing every inch the diplomat's son in a crisp, pale coloured suit as Merry clung to his arm, wearing a shirt-dress cropped to mid-thigh, jodhpurs, and a pair of riding boots. Merry in riding gear; so kinky it didn't bear thinking about.

Wandering through the shop, I was greeted by more photos of various poses, Merry sitting demurely at an antique dinner table wearing a tea dress while Gabe hovered behind her in cricket whites, with his hands on her shoulders. I was glad it was Gabe, and not some anonymous male model. If it had been anyone else, I might have been jealous, but I knew Gabe, I trusted Gabe, and what was more, he just _looked_ so cool. Gabe and Merry stopped at a country stile somewhere, both of them in Harris tweeds and patterned woolen vests in unusual colours. And there, beside the full length colour photos, were piles of the clothes, just waiting to be picked up, as if Merry's beauty or Gabe's coolness was something that could be acquired just by wearing an ugly jumper.

I rifled through the tweeds, which were quite nice, looking for my size, and popped one on. Glancing in the mirror, I was shocked to see my maternal grandfather staring back, as if he'd just blown in from a walk on Hampstead Heath. Then I looked at the price tag. Holy fuck, no. Back when I was still being financially subsidised by my father, I wouldn't have thought twice, but now I had to calculate exactly how many weeks rent the jacket would have cost. That _really_ didn't bear thinking about.

Then I saw a wealthy young woman - pretty, but not a match on Merry - exiting the store with a large paper bag, on which were emblazoned Merry and Gabe's faces. Now _that_ was total branding control. I hoped the pair of them were getting well paid for it. Putting on my preppiest smile, I walked up to the counter and greeted the young woman there.

"I'm sorry to bother you, but would it be too much trouble for me to have one of those bags, please?"

"Would you like to make a purchase?" the girl asked chirpily, but in a tone that made it quite clear that without a purchase, a bag would not be forthcoming.

I glanced over at the rack by the counter, but the cheapest item was a pair of socks emblazoned with the distinctive Firbank argyle, and they were $28. A pair. Jesus fucking christ, no. That, I now knew all too well, was the price of two complete sets of my favourite guitar strings. I'd busted strings at least twice on tour, and had to choose between strings and dinner. "I was hoping you could maybe just give me one?" I smiled what I hoped was my most charming smile. "You see, that girl? Merry? She is actually my girlfriend."

The look in the shop assistant's eyes was of total disbelief. "If she is your girlfriend, I'm sure you can ask her to obtain one from our promotional department," she told me jauntily.

"I would, you see," I said quietly, reaching for my wallet and unfolding the NME photo I had placed there only a few hours earlier. "Except she's currently on tour in Europe, and I'd really like to surprise her."

The shop girl peered at the photo, clearly recognising Merry's smile, then looked up at me with a surprised expression that gave way to indulgent admiration. She cast a quick glance up at the man on the other till, then leaned forward, lowering her voice. "Would you prefer a small one or a big one?"

"A super-big one. Preferably the biggest one you have," I whispered back with an irrepressible grin.

I felt like a _muppet_ , as she would say, carrying a massive empty Firbank bag up Fifth Avenue, then on the subway downtown, and finally all the way across Houston and down Ludlow, feeling the eyes of jealous fools upon me. Let them stare; I was proud of my girlfriend. I took the bag upstairs to my apartment and hung it in a place of pride over the computer.

Over the next two weeks, I got steadily used to the advertisements, in magazines, and on the sides of buses and taxis. It was the ones on bus shelters that really did my head in, though. I kept looking up and opening my mouth to speak to her, surprised at her sudden appearance, before realising it was another damn ad, and she was still thousands of miles away. That was a head-fuck, and I found myself wondering how Karen Litchen's and Claudia Schiffer's boyfriends coped with seeing their supermodel lovers emblazoned on the sides of busses.

And then, suddenly, Merry was home. Really, I should have taken the day off work to pick her up, or at least sent a company car, but she insisted she would be fine with a taxi, she'd meet me back at the flat. _Flat_. She had been in England for too long. I was buzzing with excitement as I made my way home from work, picked up a bottle of wine, and, on impulse, a dozen red roses from the flower stall in the lobby of the subway station. Merry, my own girlfriend, of flesh and blood, not a paper poster or a flickering image on MTV, but the actual girl in my arms.

I practically ran up the stairs, fumbled with the keys in the lock, took off my jacket to hang it in the hall closet (and, to be frank, I was tempted to rip off all of my clothes there and then and just leap on her and pull her into bed) but abruptly I was stopped by the sound of voices, and the perfume and pheromone scent of an unfamiliar woman in the apartment.

"Fireworks," Merry was saying. "We have got to have fireworks going off, just great plumes of white flame from pots in front of the stage, how cool would that be?"

"Fireworks, sure," said another voice, low, sexy, and I felt an uncontrollable growl of jealousy surge in my chest. "String section for the ballads?"

"Oh god, yes, string section. In ballgowns, of course."

"And dancing boys! Also in ballgowns?"

"Dancing boys? Dancing boys in loincloths, of course," followed by a cascade of feminine laughter.

Trying to keep the disappointment from my face, I strolled through into the living room, wine in one hand, roses in the other. All I wanted to see was Merry, my Merry, thinner than I had remembered her, but radiantly beautiful and impossibly real, even as she stood up, let out a little cry of happiness and threw her arms around me, wine bottle, roses and all. But on the other end of the sofa sat another woman, an attractive woman to be sure, maybe ten years older than us, but still very handsome, long glossy relaxed hair, racially ambiguous, as if she could be either a dark skinned Latina or a light skinned black woman. Now that was odd. Merry didn't really have girlfriends. Well, apart from the girls she used to live with (though I had no idea if they'd kept in touch while she was on the road) all of her friends seemed to be _dudes_ from the music scene.

"Sweetheart!" exclaimed Merry, smothering my face with kisses, and smearing makeup all over me, I was quite sure. She took the roses from me and cooed over them, looking absolutely adorable as she held them close to her face to smell them. How could I have forgotten the cute way that the top of her nose crinkled when she concentrated on something? I wanted to touch her face, cup it in my hands to feel the softness of her skin, stroke her hair, but I didn't dare, with a stranger in the room. Taking the wine from me, she looked up at me from under her eyelashes as if studying me. "You've been growing your hair. It suits you." Well, actually, not deliberately; my weekly trim at my expensive barber was another luxury I couldn't afford since being disowned, but I liked that she liked it. She didn't have another hand free to touch it, where it flopped gently past my ears, so I pushed it out of my eyes and grinned back at her sheepishly.

"OK, lovebirds, Work time over, let's open that wine," announced the other woman, climbing off the sofa, and relieving Merry of our wine before strutting through into the kitchen, swinging her hips in a way that was really quite distracting, even with my beautiful girlfriend standing right in front of me. The new woman was tall and rangy, like a model, and I found myself having to drag my eyes back from her long, shapely legs to Merry's expectant face.

Guiltily - though I wasn't quite sure why I felt guilty, given it was my apartment - I took Merry's hand and followed the woman through into the kitchen, locating the corkscrew and three clean wineglasses.

"This is Daniel, my boy-thing," explained Merry, and strangely, the epithet didn't bother me this time, it felt like another secret love-word between us.

"I figured, honey," the woman laughed back.

I caught Merry's eye and silently mouthed "Who is this?"

"Oh!" Merry giggled with her hand over her mouth. "You don't even know about this yet. Cindy has agreed to be our road manager for the upcoming US tour. I'm so excited! It's going to be so great having another girl along for a change. We can do each others' nails in between gigs and shit." Extending her hand, Merry showed off her nails, which were still short, but now painted a smooth, car-finish silver.

I frowned, but couldn't think of a reason to object, until Cindy extended her own hand, with extravagant, orchid-toned talons on the ends of her fingers. "Cindy Birdweather," she announced, with a Southern accent as soft as her French perfume. "Pleased to make your acquaintance."

"Cindy Birdweather?" I just about managed to stutter, adding "As in the singer?" though it took every ounce of self control not to blurt out _as in the transsexual_? Jesus fucking Christ, that was a _man_? I felt my head spin with the terrifying knowledge that I had almost accidentally fancied her, had in point of fact, actually checked out her legs as she climbed the stairs to the kitchen passage.

"One and the same," Cindy chirped, clearly flattered to be recognised.

I gaped, then felt bad for gaping but then again, she seemed so... comfortable, just hanging out in my kitchen in skin-tight jeans and a soft, feminine roll-neck sweater in a girly shade of mauve. Shit, I had to say something or I would start to seem rude, but my brain just could not move on from trying to work out what was going on in the trouser area of her... fuck, no. Stop thinking that way. Say something. "So you have much experience as a road manager?" blurted out from between my flustered lips. How could Merry be standing there so calmly, just comparing hair-care tips with her, as if... as if... this were a normal situation?

"Honey, I've been putting together road shows since the 1970s. You try getting a full Motown revue, three backing singers, big band, horn section and all, and a massive, shrieking diva, wigs and all, into a broken-down 1963 schoolbus and on the road to the next show. Managing a three-piece indie-rock band in a tour van? Cakewalk."

"Massive shrieking diva? Surely you're being a bit uncharitable to yourself?" I tried to be charming, but I could not get my thoughts out of wondering about her... _y'know_. How on earth could I even broach the topic without seeming like a total creep? But there was a part of my brain that would not, could not rest until I'd worked it out.

Cindy howled with laughter. "Me? Sweetheart, no. I grew up putting together road shows for my _Mama_. Learned from the best." Her voice was soft and feminine, but that laugh was ambiguous in a way that make me distinctly uncomfortable.

"I promise you, I will be an angel by comparison," Merry swore, taking her by the arm and leading her back out to the living room.

"A christmas angel! What an idea, Merry. We'll do you up like an angel, and have you standing, playing bass on top of a tree..."

"It's nowhere near Christmas yet. Please, let's get past Halloween before we start talking Christmas!" Merry protested. "I love Halloween... can we have a costume party?

"Special Halloween gig at the Radio City Music Hall, I can see it now..." Cindy fantasised, waving her hands about in the air, as I tried not to stare at those deep pink nails. They did not look like a man's hands, with those nails.

"Can we make it a masked ball?" Merry's eyes were huge, lit up with excitement. "Oh, I'd love to get the audience involved. Just turn the whole evening into a masquerade, like... welcome to my fantasy world. Put on a disguise, leave the real world behind and come inside our dreams!"

As they talked on and on about the tour, I silently fumed. I kept trying to subtly catch her eye, but Merry practically ignored me, reminding Cindy that they were only the buy-on support act of a major label tour, not the headlining act. Stage sets would be non-existent, and costumes minimal.

"I will do your lights, though," Cindy insisted. "I will do your lights if I have to climb up in the rig to set them myself. I will light you _good_ , angel."

And so they talked for another hour, until finally Cindy announced she was meeting Barry for supper and had to run. Merry hugged her goodbye at the door, and I offered my hand, trying to be polite, but Cindy just said "pshaw!" and hugged me too, leaving orchid coloured lipstick on the cheek I'd only just cleared of Merry's makeup.

"Isn't she amazing?" Merry gushed as she closed the door and followed me back to the living room. "She's like a force of nature, this tour is going to be so amazing. I was kinda worried about it before, but I cannot imagine there's going to be so much as a boring minute with Cindy around. Wait.. _what_? What is it?"

"She's amazing, alright," I replied, knowing my best policy, as always, was to agree. And then I realised that my girlfriend was actually frowning at me. "OK, what did I say now?"

"You're being weird," she accused.

"I am not being weird..." I stared to protest, then gave up and just shrugged. "OK, you don't see anything the slightest bit weird about a woman who used to be a man, just casually hanging out on our sofa, drinking our wine?"

"No, I don't," she said, very quietly, but in a tone that indicated total disapproval. Fuck, I was going to be in trouble if I didn't at least try to explain myself.

"OK, OK, I know what you're thinking. I'm a... a prude or something. But this is all very new to me, and..." I grasped for words, but I could see her face take on that mixture of disapproval and disappointment that was way, way worse than when she actually got angry. "It's weird to me, OK?"

"And what, exactly, is weird about it?"

I struggled to articulate my conflicting feelings. I wanted to tell her that reality didn't _bend_ like that. If Cindy Birdweather could be born a man, and just turn up a woman one day, that threw the whole of my conception of men, of women, and my place in that simple dichotomy... for fucks sake, I was a man who was interested in fashion and art and had as a teenager even dyed my hair blond to look like Nick Rhodes and had once or twice maybe even worn eyeliner at Dieter's insistence. Merry had said already that I was the _gayest_ boyfriend she'd ever had; would she one day start saying I was the _girliest_ boyfriend she'd ever had? "I almost... accidentally, mind you, not that I was checking her out or anything, because I'm not _like_ that... For fucks sake, Merry, I almost accidentally fancied her!" I felt my face flushing, though with anger or embarrassment it was hard to tell.

Merry was laughing now, a deep throaty laugh that I knew was more down to jet lag and the desiccated air of aeroplanes than anything else, but still made me nervous with its air of masculinity. "Of course you did," she finally managed to chuckle. "She's a very attractive woman... and a former pop-star to boot, which I know is irresistible to you."

"So you find her attractive? As a woman, or as a man? Because I'm not sure I like the idea of you holed up on a tourbus, gettng naked backstage and having costumes pinned on you by... by... Cindy." I wondered what Cindy had been called before he was Cindy, and felt more uncomfortable still.

"How is it any different than it was being holed up backstage with Taylor and Laura, in the Bunnygirls?"

I cast about, but did not want to articulate the reason. Because I did not know what was going on with Cindy's... genital arrangement. If Cindy still had a cock, I did not want him touching my girlfriend. But I knew there was no fucking way I could say that to Merry. We were already in an argument, but I knew that was a one-way ticket to sleeping on the couch. "I didn't know you then. But I don't know; it just is."

"She's our tour manager, and that's final. I'll go over your head and confirm it with Bebe. And don't you give me that look, Danny Asheton. You have not been on tour with us, you do not know what it's like. I just want someone on this tour who is unequivocally Team Merry, and I know that I can count on Cindy."

I shot her an unguarded look that somehow exposed all of the deep wounds that this statement opened in me. "Unequivocally Team Merry? Am I not enough? As your A&R? As your boy-thing? Do you not trust me any more?"

"Oh, Danny, I didn't mean it like that." Her face fell as she saw the hurt in my eyes, and she walked over to me and put her arms around my waist, bending over to lean her head against my shoulder, pressing her forehead tight against my head so I could feel her soft, silky hair against my face. And I felt the anger start to drain out of me, until her next statement, so soft I almost missed it. "Danny, I do daw you, but I just wish you weren't so prejudiced sometimes."

I shot away from her as if I'd been burned. "I am not prejudiced. And in fact, I resent that accusation. How can you say such a hurtful thing to me? How can you take that... person's side over mine?" I was furious again, turning away from her, wanting to storm off away from her, but it was impossible in the tiny apartment. Instead, I went to the kitchen, looking for the bottle of wine, but they had finished it. That fucking woman. Here, I had been looking to a nice, quiet evening with my girlfriend, the first in months, and that horrible Cindy Birdweather had completely fucking ruined it. I wanted to cry, to kick something, but I heard footsteps behind me. "I really hope you have come to apologise," I said sulkily.

"No," she replied in a very small voice. "I've come to tell you I'm packing my suitcase and going to a hotel."

"Merry, please, no." My voice was full of panic as I turned around and saw she was quite, quite serious. "I am sorry. I..." I grasped for the words that would turn this around and make it all better, quickly stuttering "I am sorry if you think I offended your friend or if I offended you, or whoever. I sincerely did not intend to."

"Oh." Her eyes were steely. " _I'm sorry you were offended_ , is it?"

"God, no," I spat, trying to claw back ground. "Please, let's not do this Just let me apologise, and let us move on from this."

"You just apologise too easily, like you think an apology is just going to magically make everything better. Apologies mean nothing when they're not backed with an understanding of _why_ what you did was so awful."

I looked around the kitchen helplessly, feeling cornered, then shrugged, turning my eyes towards her before admitting "You're right. I don't understand. And I guess that's the problem. It's just... this is a new world to me. A world I don't understand, and I'm scared that it might mean I don't understand _you_ any more."

Her lower lip quivered. "I'm still the same me. I'm just afraid that you might not be the _you_ I thought I knew so well."

"I haven't changed," I shrugged, though in my heart, I somehow knew that I had, because at that moment, I would have scrapped anything, heart, pride, the ability to tell right from wrong, man from woman, just to get her to stay. "OK, maybe that's the problem, because your life has changed so much, and I've gone nowhere. We used to be in the same place, you and me, fighting the same battles, to get heard, to get signed. But now it's like you've gone over this massive hill without me, and I'm scared I can't even keep up with you any more."

"This isn't even about Cindy, _really_ , is it?" she said quietly, chewing on a short, silver fingernail.

"Oh, don't let's fight about it," I begged, feeling suddenly desperately tired, down to the marrow of my bones. "Please stay with me, just tonight, if you want. You are tired, you are jet-lagged, and if you still think I'm an asshole in the morning, and you want to go, you can go. But please let us not fight right now."

For a moment, she just stood there, wavering, but finally she put the battered, old fashioned suitcase down, and walked away, to bed.

She didn't leave, in the morning. I kissed her good morning, surprised that she'd managed to sleep through until 6, then made her a cup of tea. Then I kissed her again, more insistently, and then we were slipping into each others' arms, the embrace getting deeper and more urgent until she reached for the box of condoms, and then I was inside her. I was perhaps a bit more rough with her than I intended, slamming her into the mattress as if trying to reclaim her, this stranger I hadn't seen in two months, but she arched her back to meet me, and latched onto my tongue and sucked it into her mouth. I pounded her body with my own, but she took it, and when she finally came it was so explosive I worried for our neighbours through the tenement walls.

And I kissed her and stroked her pretty hair, then smiled mischievously and asked her "So, was I better than Graham Cooper?"

She laughed out loud, and just snorted "As fucking if I'd get with him," then rolled over on top of me, picking up the end of her braid and dusting it ever so gently back and forth around the outline of my face. It tickled, but I also loved the sensation, never wanting her to stop. "That said, Slur's bassist did try it on with me, at the Astoria aftershow."

"Really?" Now my pride was piqued.

She giggled and flicked the tip of my nose with her hair. "Yeah, I knocked him back, though. Arrogant prick. He just reminded me too unpleasantly of Dieter, for some reason. Never in a million years."

I felt pride surge back through my body, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her off balance, holding her on top of me tightly as I kissed her face. "I fucking daw you, OK?"

"Throw a sickie. Stay in bed with me."

And for the first time in my life, I actually rang into work, told Bebe that I had come down with an acute case of Merry-itis, possibly life-threatening, and that I would be _working_ Deltawave from home all day, and Bebe just laughed and told me not to show my face in the office until Monday.


	16. Jealousy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Merry tries to readjust back into her old, East Village life again, after months on the road, the corrosive effects of jealousy and envy seem to be undermining everyone's relationships.
> 
> Dieter is envious of Deltawave's success, Doyle is jealous of Daniel and Merry's relationship, Daniel is jealous over Doyle's friendship with Merry, and Merry feels herself torn in two, worrying that envy is having the same destructive influence on her lover that it is having within her band.
> 
> (And here, we are pretty much at the halfway point of the story, because in the next chapter... EVERYTHING changes, and Asheton's world turns upside down.)

Our time together was so short that I insisted Merry come along to everything I did that wasn't work. We spent all our time re-immersing ourselves in the normality that was grocery shopping at Key Foods, dropping off laundry and dry cleaning, a cup of tea and a gossip at the Pink Pony. I knew that she was probably completely sick to death of music and band politics, but when I asked if she wanted to tag along to rehearsal that evening, she surprised me by saying yes.

Her appearance actually seemed to please Doyle, who always sang better when he had an audience. Sitting in a corner, she watched us with a genuinely happy expression on her face, shaking her hair in time with the beat and clapping along, even letting Doyle drag her to her feet to provide the backing vocals for Sailor To The Sea. It was funny; with her blonde hair and her snub nose, I'd never actually noticed how much she and Doyle looked like brother and sister, the same quick, mischievous grins that hinted at some darker emotion inside, as their voices blended together. And suddenly I felt myself creeped out a bit by that. Was it weird if the girl you loved looked a bit like your singer; what on earth would that say about you? It was bad enough that my own girlfriend teased me about my "gayness" without my own bandmates making me doubt my own sexuality on the regular.

But Dieter was in a bad mood, complaining subtly but snidely about 'women', though Merry had the good sense to ignore him. Merry's ability to ignore people I knew irritated her seriously impressed me, though I felt proud that I was the one she would complain to when we got home. We all went out for our customary drinks afterwards in the scary Irish old man pub, and my pride increased as I saw nostalgic eyes all around come to rest mistily on her. Even Paddy winked and gave her a nip of whiskey on the house. After seeing her on television and on billboards and in magazines for the past months, it seemed so strange to have her back in my life again, sitting in my regular bar, chatting with my friends. She seemed like a rare, exotic bird, come to perch in the middle of that sawdust-strewn floor, stained peaty-gold with a thousand drops of spilled Guinness. And even Dieter's bad mood couldn't spoil my joy in her.

It soon came out, though, what Dieter was in a funk about. "Have you heard that the Rocket Pops got signed by a major? MVC even set them up with their own sub-label so they can pretend to be indie. _Indie_ , as if it's just fucking semantics, the difference between being independent and subaltern. Makes me sick."

"Fuck the Rocket Pops, man," snorted Doyle, sinking another slug of Guinness before turning back to gaze at Merry. "Though I hear Jeremy Rocket Pops is officially banging one of the Charms, so yeah, I guess they're even getting way more fucks than we are."

"The _Chums_." Dieter's voice dripped with contempt. "They are such a fucking girlfriend band it doesn't surprise me one of them is fucking a Rocket Pop. They only ever got their record deal because one of them is married to Carlos from the Jesus Sugarpussy, fucking sell-outs that the Sugarpussy turned out to be."

I could see that he had got Merry's back up, as she narrowed her eyes at him. " _Girlfriend band_? That's fucking sexist, even for you, Dieter."

"Sexist? It's just the truth, honey, not my fault if it hurts."

Merry bristled. "It's not even true, for a start. I know them, and they got signed because some big English indie label boss took a shine to them. He'd never even heard of the Rocket Pops or the Jesus Sugarpussy. Christ, I haven't been hanging out at the Lacuna half as long as you guys, and I know the legend about how they were signed to Destructive Records straight off the stage in the back room."

Dieter glared at her; I knew how much he hated to be contradicted, especially by a girl. _For gods sake_ , I found myself thinking. _Do not set Merry off on her sexism kick, or I won't get laid again for the rest of the week_.

But Dieter was sparring with her again. "That's my fucking point, thank you, Miriam. How is it that appallingly terrible bands like The Rocket Pops and The Charms can get signed, off the stage in the back of the Lacuna Lounge, and we still can't get a deal?"

"Maybe we're just a _boyfriend band_ ," Doyle observed, with a wink at Merry.

"We had a deal, though," Dick butted in, before Merry and Dieter could come to blows. "What's happened with Three Square Records? I thought they were happy with the way we sold out the run of Impediment?"

I shifted uneasily in my seat. Dick was so keen just to have a record out that he really would sign with anyone, while no matter what the band did ever seemed to satisfy Dieter. Walking the narrow road between them was not going to be easy. "We're not going to do an album with Three Square. Three Square have a great reputation, but they have proved from the running-out-of-singles-while-on-tour debacle that they just do not have the capacity or the distribution to handle our album. Be patient, guys, I am working on it," I lied. I was not, really. I had been working the hell out of Deltawave, but had started to lose confidence in my own band.

"Why don't you just sign to Windlass?" Merry wondered.

"Can't," I said with a faint air of irritation I hoped wasn't audible to anyone but her. "Bebe says it's conflict of interest."

"Boyfriend band," hooted Doyle across the table, but Merry ignored him like she ignored the blatant staring he'd been doing all evening. What, was Doyle suddenly developing a crush on Merry, now that she had started modelling? My irritation suddenly flared.

Merry looked at me carefully, and her face suddenly softened as if she had only just realised how much I had put my own dreams on hold to attend to hers. "You should quit, then. You've got so much better things to do with your life than just run around after Deltawave."

"Do you not even appreciate the amount of work that I do for your band?" I said, very quietly, feeling my heart - or my pride - shrink away from her slightly.

"That isn't what I said." There was a long moment of silence between us, as the rest of Metropolis shifted uncomfortably. "I appreciate everything that you have done for us. But you know as well as I do that Elisha doesn't. Elisha doesn't appreciate anyone except himself."

I moved back in my chair, pulling up the collar of my blazer as I wondered where the chill in the room was coming from. But Dieter launched himself into the sudden space in the conversation. "Daniel, I really think that it is about time that you decided whether your priority is _our_ band, or your _girlfriend's_ band."

"Lay off him, man." Dick stepped in, ever the peacemaker. "I have got further in 6 months with this band than I have got in years with any of my other bands. We've had a single out, we've done a tour, we've been on MTV. I am prepared to accept that the man here has our best interests at heart."

"Maybe you are," sniffed Dieter. "But I'm just letting you know that skilled bassists are at a premium in this city. There are always other bands that would have me."

"You can always go and join the Rocket Pops," giggled Doyle. "I'm sure they can find you an extra Charm to shag."

"Fuck you guys," snorted Dieter. He picked up his beer, and slammed the remainder down in one go, then picked up his bass case and stalked from the bar.

For several minutes, silence hung awkwardly over the table, until finally Doyle leaned forward in his chair, and started to clap, very slowly and sarcastically. "Dieter Finkel, ladies and gentlemen," he finally announced. "The autumn season's biggest drama queen."

Merry stared at him before bursting into a little cascade of giggles. "Finkel? Dieter's surname is Finkel?"

"Ezra Dieter Finkel," Doyle nodded, finishing his glass of beer.

"Ezra Finkel." Merry almost collapsed in laughter. "You know, that almost makes me sorry for him. Whenever Dieter starts to really wind me up, I am just going to remember that he went through 12 years of school with the name Ezra D. Finkel."

"Look, do you guys wanna get another round in, or shall we split a taxi back to the Lower East Side with our guitar cases?" Doyle asked, with a hopeful glance towards the bar.

"Another round, please," Merry agreed, almost too quickly. To my sharp glance, she flashed me a pleading smile, and said "It's been far too long since I just hung out gossiping with my mates from the music scene. I didn't realise how much I missed it. Indulge me?"

We had another two rounds of Guinness, laughing cattily as we filled Merry in on all the gossip from the scene, who had been signed, who had been dropped, who was dating whom - and had she heard that although Kate Charms was supposed to be dating Jeremy Rocket Pop, those rumours about her screwing around with the arrogant prick bassist from Slur were still sloshing around like spilled beer on the floor of the Pyramid Club? She drank it up greedily, asking more and more questions, until I realised... This was weird for her, too. While she'd been off on tour for two months, the City had moved on without her. There was so much she'd missed, too.

When we'd caught her up with the comings and goings of every single shitty band on Ludlow Street, we walked back out to the Avenue and caught a taxi heading downtown. Dick climbed into the front, and Doyle made a bit of a show about letting Merry get in before him, as I walked round the other side, so that she ended up in the middle. Doyle seemed a little bit drunk and it was starting to bother me how much attention he was suddenly paying Merry. 

When he leaned forward, saying "Hang on, Merry, you've got something on your face," and reached out to brush away a clump of fluff that had settled there from the hood of her coat, I felt the need to intervene.

"So how's Effie?" I asked rather pointedly.

Doyle slumped back against the side of the taxi, pouting sourly. "In France... or Italy... who knows. On a shoot somewhere. Why on earth do we end up dating girls who spend half their life abroad?"

"You guys will be fine," Merry told him, patting him affectionately on the knee, but I felt myself fuming inside at the sudden intimacy. "After all, we are," she added, but I felt distinctly un-fine at that moment.

We dropped off Dick first, waiting as he got his snare and cymbals from the trunk of the cab, then pulled up outside Doyle and Effie's loft. "Say, do you guys want to come in for a nightcap?" Doyle suggested as the taxi idled. "We could drink a bottle of wine, maybe order a pizza and watch Vampiros Lesbos on VCR?"

"No, really, we don't," I snapped, a little too sharply, as Doyle wrestled his guitar case out of the back, before Merry could accept on my behalf.

Doyle just shouldered his guitar case with a resigned shrug, then slapped the roof of the cab. "OK. Bye then, kids, don't bang too hard."

I fumed silently as the cab drove the last 3 blocks to our apartment building, but as the taxi pulled up outside, I reached for my wallet, and found myself swearing. "Dammit," I cursed, to Merry's concerned look. "I got money off Dick, but fucking Doyle, he walked off without putting in his share again."

"Your fault for not accepting his invitation. He'd have had to cough up then." Merry merely laughed, digging in her handbag, then passed me enough money to cover both of them.

"Oh, and of course you're Doyle's biggest fan, now," I heard my voice say. Shit. Had I said that out loud? I must have had more Guinness than I thought.

Merry sighed deeply, flouncing up the steps of the tenement building, leaving me to get my guitar case by myself. "Danny, he's lonely. Can you not see that? You have lived here your whole life, but you and Dieter are pretty much the only people he knows in New York City, and his girlfriend is always away. Would it have been so bad if we'd gone round and had pizza and watched some bad films with him?"

Feeling thoroughly bad-tempered from the way she was taking Doyle's side, I followed her up the endless flights of stairs. The next place I lived, I was having an elevator, even if it cost another two hundred dollars a month. "So you're keen to watch porn films with Doyle now."

"Vampiros Lesbos is hardly porn, it's just schlocky 60s kitsch. I thought you loved 60s kitsch."

"Since when do you love Doyle so much?" We were inside our flat now, so I didn't care if it came out.

"What?" She looked at me with an absolutely blank expression of failure to understand.

"Flirting with him in the cab... _oh hey, you've got something on your face_... in front of me, no less." This was why I never let myself get really drunk; all the spiteful horrible things I felt but never said came seeping out.

As Merry stared at me, the realisation of what I was insinuating spread across her face. "You're insane."

"Are you denying it?"

"No... no, no, no, no, no." She shook her head most insistently. "No, we are not doing this. You are not pulling this shit on me..."

"No, you're not denying it, or no, you don't think that was flirting."

"Danny, don't do this! This is nuts! This is like the whole thing with Cindy the other night, for fucks sake. Working yourself into a tizzy over some shit in your own head. Do you really honestly think that I would... with Doyle? That's absurd! I like Doyle because he reminds me so much of what my brother would have grown up to be like. My _dead_ brother, remember?" The strength of her denial reassured me somewhat, but what came next pulled the floor out from under me. "This is why I keep saying, I don't want to be in a full-on boyfriend-girlfriend _relationship_ with you. I am away so much. You _have_ to trust me, either trust me completely, or let me go. Because this shit is going to drive you crazy."

I sank down to the sofa, feeling the bottom of my stomach dropping away. Why on earth had I slammed down that last pint of Guinness so fast, and on an empty stomach? Because I'd wanted to get Merry away from Doyle, that was why. Suddenly, I saw her point, though I didn't want to admit it to her.

"Sweetheart," she said. "We have four days left together, before I have to go on tour for three months. Can we, please, just sit down and have a bottle of wine, and order a pizza, and watch some bad movies curled up together on the sofa while spooning, because I just do not have the energy in me right now for this..." She wasn't even angry; it was the dead tone in her voice that scared me.

No please, do not start crying, I tried to tell my eyes, but they did not pay much attention. My face was flushing, and I was certain that I looked a mess, but she just kept looking at me and not saying anything. "I'm just so scared right now... I'm so afraid. I love you so much that it completely terrifies me, even just the thought of losing you."

"You are definitely going to lose me if you don't stop this insane jealousy over my friends," she said, far too calmly.

I swallowed nervously, trying to regain control over myself. She wasn't supposed to say that, she was supposed to reassure me and tell me that she dawed me. "Tell me what to do. Tell me how to keep this. Because... Merry, you are the single best and most important thing in my life right now."

" _No_ ," she insisted, with a passion that surprised me. "No, don't say that, that's horseshit and we both know it. Because your band is the single best and most important thing in your life, and if you don't own that, we're... I won't have you lying to me or yourself."

I managed a vague grin through the mess of my emotions. "Actually, I think we've already established tonight, that _your_ band is the most important thing in my life right now, at least according to Dieter." I wanted her to come over and sit down next to me, but she stayed on the other side of the room, her arms folded across her chest, just looking at me with that perplexed and slightly sad expression.

"Maybe we should take a break," she finally said.

" _No_!"

"What do you mean, _no_? Danny, we're making each other miserable right now."

"I mean, no. If you want to finish with me, then fucking finish with me. End it, go off on tour and I'll ask Bebe to work on another band, and you leave me alone and we never see each other again until I get over you. But if we're together, we're in all the way." I felt a sickening lurch in my stomach as I called her bluff, terrified of her response, but instead of collecting her things, she walked over and sat down on the sofa next to me.

"In all the way, huh," she said quietly.

"Hold me?" I asked, barely daring to ask.

"Trust me?" she responded, even more quietly, then put her arms around me, and enfolded me in her embrace, crushing my head against her breasts until I almost couldn't breath, smelling nothing but the almond oil scent of her hair, and I finally felt safe and warm. "I have to deal with so much bullshit, because of jealousy, because of insecurity, in my _job_ , that I do not want to have to come home and deal with it all over again."

"I do trust you," I finally told her, and realised I meant it. "I might not trust Doyle, or Cindy, or Michael, or Elisha, or anyone else in our world, but I do trust my _girlfriend_." I used the word deliberately, as if daring her to contradict it, replace it with some weird, dismissive Merry-ism, but she let it stand unchallenged, which reassured me somewhat. "It's just... I'm scared." My stomach did another flip-flop as I admitted it.

"I'm scared, too, Danny," she said, as her fingers found my hair, pulling out my curls in that oh-so-familiar habit I'd once found slightly annoying, but now found comforting and familiar. "People do change; both success and failure changes people in ways you don't even realise until it's happened. People you thought you could trust just pull the rug out from under you, because of fucking envy. I'm sick of being the focus for other people's insecurity. Are you really jealous over me, or are you actually envious?"

I thought about that for a long time, feeling the familiar tug of her fingertips against the roots of my unruly hair. "Of course I'm a little bit envious. But it's not the kind of envy where I want to tear you down - for fucks sake, I've been busting my ass for half the last year to make you this successful - but it's the kind of envy where it spurs _me_ to want to be better. So I can be worthy of you - pop star, Firbank model, whatever."

She laughed, though it was a laugh tinged with relief rather than mockery. "I love you how you are. Do you not get that? I loved you as spoiled trustafarian in an expensive suit, I love you as a penniless indie guitarist who can't afford to get your hair cut. I love you as an A&R guy, I loved you as a bean-counting bookkeeping clerk. Can _you_ love me as a ' _Firbank model_ ' as much as you loved me as a hopeless East Village session bassist?" She said the words 'Firbank model" so dismissively I almost laughed aloud.

Twisting around in her embrace, I looked up into her eyes and risked a smile. "Of course I do. I believe in you."

"I need your belief in me, Danny. I need that more than anything."

I looked up at her, at the halo of blonde hair around her face, and for a moment, thought about how much she looked like a picture of a saint I must have seen in Sunday School as a child. Either that, or a long-forgotten clip of Abba, looking impossibly glamourous on Top Of The Pops, when I was a child. Pop stars, saints, they were the same thing to me. "My belief in you? That is the one thing you will never not have."

We had solemn, sentimental make-up sex on the sofa that night, and in the morning we both picked up and tried to go on. We went to brunch at the Manhattan Cafe, then we walked up as far as Washington Square, hand in hand as we watched the NYU students lounging round the campus, playing guitar, and laughing together. I could hardly believe I had ever been so young myself; though it did make me to smile to see intense young boys still playing guitars in an attempt to impress arty female NYU students.

As we walked home, hand in hand, down Broadway, we stopped outside Tower Records, staring at the giant blow-up poster of Deltawave's album cover in the "New Releases" section of the front windows, and both of us stood quietly and studied it. They'd called it Downtime, in honour of the band name they'd been forced to abandon, partly just to get up the nose of Bebe, who still thought it was a terrible name, and partly to reclaim back a little bit of their history and fanbase who might not have known they'd changed their name. The album cover looked fantastic, all white and bleached out, like a lacuna in the busy, frenetic shop window. The three of them sat, all dressed in white, their faces in varying shades of pink and brown the only colour, perfectly arranged and formal, around an all-white room, at once futuristic and space-ace, and yet oddly classical. Even the view out the window in the background was of a snowy forest, and the name of the band and album title were spelled out in pure white letters against the shadowy white wall in the background. On the back, they posed with white instruments, white bass, white synth, white amps, and Gabe's weird plexiglass drumkit looking perfectly normal in context. No other band in the East Village looked like that. They wouldn't dare.

Mistaking my silence for envy, she squeezed my hand and smiled sideways at me. "Don't worry, it'll be you, soon." I laughed and hugged her and kissed her hair, then we walked on to Other Music.

On the way home, laden with shopping bags full of CDs she had bought me for a change, she nudged me. "When we get home, really, you should call Doyle and ask him if he wants to come round and have dinner."

I was about to protest, then remembered the tears of the night before. "Alright. I will if it makes you happy." 

"It's not to make _me_ happy, honey."

But as we turned onto Ludlow, we saw him standing outside the Lacuna Lounge, sharing a cigarette with Charlene before she went back in to start her shift at the bar. "Hey," I ventured, trying to keep the jealousy out of my voice. "We're just on our way to get takeaway for dinner. Do you want to join us, maybe come round and watch a film?"

Doyle grinned, and then actually bounced like an excited puppy. "Sure thing... do you want me to go to the liquor store and get a bottle of wine?" Then all three of us walked down to the shops, picked up takeaway and a bottle of wine, then strolled back to the flat, Doyle pretending to fake us out and shoot baskets over our heads, all the way home.

And it was actually fine. Doyle sat on the floor, while Merry and I sat on the sofa, and we watched episode after episode of The Prisoner, smoking bowls of weed until the plot actually started to make sense. We'd got so caught up in band politics, in gigs and jockeying for position within the scene that I realised it had actually been months since Doyle and I had just hung out, purely socially. And I realised as we started comparing notes on various theories we'd constructed around Patrick McGoohan's character when we were young, that Doyle was a smart guy; I really _liked_ Doyle. Doyle had been practically my best friend before Merry had come on the scene. And when Merry was on tour, and Effie was on a shoot, we could fulfil that role for one another again.

After midnight, Doyle finally left, and he went staggering off down Ludlow St, waving excitedly up at the window from which Merry and I watched. I turned to Merry and squeezed her hand. "Thank you," I told her, surprised to find that I meant it. "I needed that."

Merry gripped my hand fiercely and stared directly into my eyes. "Don't ever stop being friends with your bandmates. I'm serious. It stops being fun, and it starts being just a job with shitty hours when you stop being friends."

"You're friends with your band," I shrugged, wrapping my arms around her waist and wondering how soon I could tempt her up into bed.

"I'm friends with Gabe, yes," she sighed, but she didn't need to say anything else. I knew, from the messages on the answering machine we used to screen our calls, that she had spoken to Gabe almost every day since they'd got home. We'd all hung out once or twice. In fact, one evening I'd got home from work to find Gabe and Merry sitting in the middle of the floor with bits of electronic kit spread out all over sheets of newspaper, Gabe reading a sheet of schematics while Merry fiddled with a soldering iron and a lump of weird electronics. When I'd asked what the hell they were up to, Gabe had laughed and said they were building a theremin from a kit. Merry and Gabe were still thick as thieves.

But we'd heard nothing from Elisha.


	17. Sign Your Name Across My Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The chapter where everything changes.
> 
> First, with a little help from television magic, Deltawave finally score their very first, bona fide Top Ten Hit.
> 
> But as Daniel is scrabbling to keep up with the huge increase in his and Merry's workload that this entails, his life abruptly goes skidding off in the opposite direction, as Metropolis, _finally_ , get signed to a record deal that none of them can refuse. But will Metropolis' success come at the expense of everything else in his life that Daniel has worked so hard for?

At the end of our brief week together, Merry packed her suitcase back up, and the pair of us drove with Gabe down to the lock-up where Deltawave's gear was stored. As they were only a buy-on, they were not sharing the tour-bus with the headlining band, but Cindy had sorted out a trailer that would carry most of their gear, so whoever wasn't driving could sleep comfortably on the back benches on the journeys between gigs. The four of us loaded up the drumkit and all the amps into the trailer, then I handed out the tour itineraries to band and road manager - Cindy got one about twice as thick as the group - then we sat down to wait for Elisha.

Merry hadn't wanted to make a scene in front of her bandmates, so we'd already said our goodbye properly back at the flat, clinging onto one another, me squeezing her ass gently, her digging her fingers into my mussed hair, kissing, and then crying a little bit, and then kissing some more. So instead, we stood facing each other in front of the van, me wondering when I was going to see her again, as she reached gently for my hand, and held it until Elisha finally arrived, over half an hour late. Then they all climbed into the van, Cindy driving, Merry riding shotgun with the map, the boys lounging in the back, one to each bench. And with brief jaunty waves, the band pulled off, and I stood on the curb, watching the van getting smaller and smaller down the length of the avenue, until it finally disappeared. Although I was excited for them, there was a part of me that just felt bereft. Three months without Merry?

Three months that ended up turning into six months, as Deltawave's manager booked another bigger, better support slot immediately after the first tour ended, with only a weekend in LA as a break between. But we managed the best we could. I spoke to Merry at least once a week, in my official capacity as A&R, if not as boyfriend, but the time was always brief and there was always someone else who wanted her attention.

The first single tanked. Bebe said it was fine, it wasn't the end of the world, they'd just try again with _Shame_ , the track we'd wanted to use the first time. But I couldn't help but feel disappointed as I watched _Autotelic_ slowly climb the Billboard Hot 100, hover down under the top 40, make one tiny incursion into the low 30s for two weeks as they got some good regional airplay in support of the tour, and then saw it plummet back down out of the charts until it was withdrawn. It reminded me of being 10 again, the feathery sense of fear and excitement in my gut at those life and death chart battles between my fake "friends'" bands, except now those bands battling for the smaller and smaller numbers were my _actual_ friends.

"We're releasing Merry's track next," Bebe informed me, dropping the new artwork for the _Shame_ CD-single on my desk. "And that is the last time that we will ever pander to Elisha's whims, and feel free to remind him of the number 36, any time he ever makes a noise about wanting to make the band's A &R decisions ever again."

I picked up the cover and stared at the photo, feeling Merry's gaze go through me like my cock used to sink into her. As if to prove a point, Elisha was a vague blob in the background, Gabe a slightly less indistinct presence in the middle distance, with Merry in sharp focus in the foreground. It was a beautiful shot, Merry looking like a hipper, cooler version of the aristocratic Firbank model, but surely it was the death knell for any hope of reconciliation within the band.

When I saw the video for _Shame_ , I actually gasped aloud. I had known that Mandy was talented, from what she'd whipped up for Metropolis on a shoestring. But with ten times the budget, Mandy's imagination had taken flight and soared. I had no idea how they'd done it - I hadn't been at the shoot, though I had wondered why Merry had been complaining about flotation tanks - but all three members of the band were underwater. It was Merry that the effect really worked best on, her silvery hair and her gauzy turquoise dress floating about, blending and merging with the swirling blue and silver abstract patterns that flowed around her, before dissipating into waves of green and blue bubbles that reconstituted themselves in another scene. It was one of the most intricate, enchanting things I'd ever seen, perfect for the intricate yet haunting clockwork of the song. If this track didn't go top 10, I would just give up and go ask my sister for a job as an accountant, because my ear for a hit single was no good at all. And then slowly, tentatively, like a fish nibbling at bait, the single started to rise up the Billboard Hot 100.

I was juggling too many things at once, ringing local radio stations myself, hassling the press department downstairs to push for more coverage, all at the same time as rehearsing twice a week with my band and scraping together ten minutes at a time on the phone to talk to my lover. I was stretched too thin, and I knew it, but either this record was going to be a success, or I'd have a nervous breakdown trying. MTV2 picked up the video but wasn't giving it as much traction as they could, while MuchMusic had it in heavy rotation. Local radio was behind it, but national radio wouldn't push it beyond occasional rotation.

And then, a break. A television network started using the dizzy, cooing outro to the song, where Merry just broke loose and started idly yet slightly psychotically singing "la la laa la la, such a shame" in harmony with herself over a swirling psychedelic backbeat, in the trailer for the next season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. People started ringing television stations to ask what that _Such A Shame_ track was, then requesting it on the radio. Then the show itself bought the rights to use the track on the soundtrack. I did a tiny whoop for joy when Merry told me how much they'd paid for it. And then next thing, they wanted to know if Deltawave would do a cameo on the show, playing the song at The Bronze, the cool vampire hangout where characters in the show congregated. The band took a day and a half sabbatical from their tour, flew off and shot the cameo on location, then immediately flew back to do a gig in Atlanta the same night. _Shame_ started rising, as if being tugged, towards the top of the charts. It was intoxicating, watching the numbers flip by, week after week. Low 30s. High 20s. 17. 12. 9. 8. 6. 7. 6... then back down to 9 as some annoying new group from Britain, called the Spice Girls, surged up to number one, shattering the order of the charts.

Still, a genuine, bona fide Top 10 record, and the album's sales were picking up considerably. I didn't even need to go down to accounting to check with Andre - Deltawave were certain to recoup now. Breathing a sigh of relief after pulling 12 hour shifts for weeks, I went home and collapsed straight into bed without even bothering to check my answering machine. I hadn't done for days; the only person I ever wanted to talk to on the phone was Merry.

But early the next morning - annoyingly early - my phone started ringing. Thinking it might be Merry forgetting the time difference again, I stumbled down the ladder in my pyjamas and rushed to the phone "Yeah, yeah, sweetie, I'm here... I'm awake... yup... don't hang up..."

But it was a man's voice on the other end of the line. "Have I finally got through to Dan Asheton?"

"Yeah, this is me... what... what time is it? Wait, who is this?" I squinted at the clock - 7am. What the fuck?

"My name is Gerry Warschultz. I've been trying to get through to you all week, but you don't seem to want to return my calls. I know musicians tend to keep unusual hours, so I thought I'd try an unusual time of the morning."

"Look, look, Mr Warschultz," I hedged, racking my brain for who on earth it might be. Not anyone from Windlass, though who on earth else would have my home phone number? 

"Gerry, please."

"You've got my attention, Gerry, but listen, do you mind either getting to the point, or letting me make a cup of tea first?" Detaching the cordless phone, I carried it through into the kitchen. Gerry Warschultz. The name was so familiar - was that that annoying guy down in plugging who controlled access to Clear Channel? He seemed like the kind of guy who could get your home phone number whether you wanted him to or not.

"Let me do you one better. Let me take you - and any of you Metropolis boys that are awake this time of morning - to breakfast. I'm up at Union Square, I don't think that's too far away for you?"

"I'm sorry, but, Gerry... who the hell are you?" I was getting irritated now, the guessing game no longer funny to my uncaffeinated mind.

"Did you not get my messages? I'm Gerry Warschultz, from Musketeer Records. I've had your demo sitting on my desk for six months, but I've only just been told by a little bird that this Metropolis, the one with the shitty Kraftwerk cover on their demo, is the same one as that stunning video that was on BuzzBin two months ago, and is the same one with the ultra-rare limited edition EP on Three Square Records. The question to me is, why has a band this good not put out an album? And I wanted to take you to breakfast to see if Musketeer could maybe help with that. OK, if you're not game, if you'd rather stay with Three Square, that's your decision, but they don't seem to be working you very hard, as you should really have had another single or two since then... Daniel... Danny-boy, are you there?"

I had actually dropped the phone in surprise, and spent the next 30 seconds frantically trying to recover it as the receiver spilled all of my hopes and dreams onto my kitchen floor. "Yeah, sorry, I'm here. Where did you say you were? Union Square? Totally stoked. I can be there in an hour. Half an hour."

I didn't even bother phoning Doyle first. I threw on a clean set of clothes, ran a comb through my hair, then ran the short blocks down to his building. Doyle was a nut - I could not believe how easy it was to break into his building, casually walking down the alley, climbing up onto the fire escape then bolting up the six flights of stairs to his window, banging on it with my knuckles until Doyle appeared, stark naked and disoriented, rubbing sleep from his eyes. For a moment, I wondered if he always slept in the nude or if Effie was back, but I didn't care, this was too important.

"Jeez, Asheton, you could have just used the intercom..."

"I know you, you would not have woken up for the intercom. Get dressed, we need to go now, this is the big one."

"What big one? Godzilla? Invasion From Mars? I'd say earthquake, but I can't feel the ground moving," laughed Doyle as he scrambled around for a pair of underpants. When Effie wasn't there, the place became a disorganised tip.

"The big one. Hot damn, we are getting signed today. The head of A&R for Musketeer Records just rang me at 7am and offered to take us to breakfast. Our dreams just came true."

Doyle just gaped at me. Yes, that had been my reaction, too. I couldn't even count the number of Musketeer bands I had loved over the years, collected their records, gone to their gigs. In fact, as I glanced at the giant framed concert poster over Doyle's bed, I realised, that Mexican Summers were a Musketeer band, too. Metropolis, a Musketeer band. I had never wanted anything so badly in my life. Merry's words flashed across my mind, oddly prophetic. _Don't worry, it'll be you soon_. I was due in the office for a 9 am call with Merry that morning. But I knew she would understand, and even if she didn't, at that moment, I think I actually wanted a deal with Musketeer Records more than I wanted my relationship with Merry. She had been right about that too; Merry was always right about me.

Doyle and I stood on the sidewalk outside that restaurant on Union Square, and for a moment, just stared at one another, excited, terrified, too nervous to speak, and yet barely suppressing whoops of triumph. Through the window, I could actually see a man in a faded Dead Letters T-shirt sitting at a table, his head bent over a copy of the Village Voice, and realised that I totally knew Gerry Warschultz's face from dozens of issues of the CMJ.

Doyle's voice, normally quite deep, broke with nerves, as he turned towards me and stuttered "Are we really going to do this." Doyle, imperturbable, wise-acre Doyle, was actually terrified.

I took a deep breath and put one of my hands on each of his shoulders to steady him. "Hot damn, we are _so_ going to do this." Then I grasped the handle with both hands and opened the door to the second half of my life.

 

\----------

 

It didn't take months and months for Metropolis to sign with Musketeer, though, granted, it took a day or two longer than just our first breakfast. We met with Gerry and Gerry laid it down on the line: Musketeer didn't believe in massive advances and multi-page contracts with a billion lines that had to be torn apart by a lawyer. They had the shortest record contact that I had ever seen. (Gerry said that he had borrowed it off Alternative Tentacles, who had produced the most equitable and fair contract known to man.) Musketeer paid to record the record, but Metropolis kept the rights and could buy back the masters at any time. There was no insane royalty fee structure; after costs were recouped (and the band had the right to reject any spurious costs in advance) the profits were split 50/50. The contract would be re-negotiated on an album by album basis, but under the assumption that if we left to go to a major, the major would pay a modest buy-out fee.

I took the contract to Merry's lawyer, who read it over once, took off her glasses and said "This guy is either clinically insane or a genius. I'd be struck off it I told you _not_ to sign this."

Gerry just laughed and said that when he'd first started using their contract, everyone had said he was insane, but it had been working for nearly 20 years and dozens of classic albums, over half of which had placed in Spin Magazine's 200 Best Alternative Records Of All Time. All bands were allowed total artistic freedom. Sure, Musketeer would make suggestions of who to work with, but bands chose their own producers, their own titles and artwork, their own singles, their own video directors, even their own photographers if they liked. How much they chose to put into it was up to them. Some artists - the mysterious Rec Tangle, for example - did no press, released no photographs, and their videos were little more than abstract colours set to their music. But if Metropolis wanted to dress ourselves in tailored suits and hire Mario Testino to do our promotional photos, well, it was our budget and our call.

Dieter's eyes had flashed at that, as we gathered in the front booth of the Lacuna to talk it over, and he started talking about full colour, glossy, 8-page booklets of lavish art he had planned for every single. But the rest of the band had told him to reign in his vision, because we all knew the story of how Blue Monday was the fastest selling 12" single of all time, but the legend was that every copy lost New Order money because the artwork was so lavish.

Dick had questions - of course Dick had questions because he wasn't quite as blinded to the Musketeer name and logo as everyone else. Would we be able to quit their jobs? Probably not, for the time being, or at least until we started touring. We wouldn't be on a salary, like a band at a major would be, so we had to make our tiny advance last - but unlike a major, we'd start seeing money from our sales almost as soon as we started making them. (And at least 2 of Musketeer's records had gone Gold over the years; it had been known to happen.)

Would we be able to tour? Gerry had said that we would be given some basic tour support - enough money to cover a van and gas money - because it was in everybody's interests if the band toured. If we wanted his advice, we should buy the biggest van we could afford and learn to live in it. Those tourbuses that major labels provided, they were nice, but they were very expensive, and not worth it until they reached the large theatre level of venues.

I had questions, too. Were Musketeer really going to be able to provide all of the PR and press and pluggers and fees and bribes and whatever to get on MTV's BuzzBin, did they have the A&R capability to really push Metropolis into the next tier? And Gerry had just stared at me until his eyes creased up and he laughed and laughed and laughed, great belly laughs that made the slightly obese man shake like a landslide, until I confessed that I had been working, for the past year, for Windlass Records, and I'd got used to maintaining a certain standard of publicity.

At which point, Gerry had wiped his eyes with his napkin and eventually managed to stop laughing, before turning to me and fixing me with a penetrating gaze. "Windlass have their way of doing things; we have ours. Now I know that Windlass know their business backwards and forwards, and I'm sure you've learned from the best. Harvey or Bebe or whoever hired you would not have taken you on if they didn't think you had a nose for business. But Windlass is all business. And Musketeer - we're more like a family. Some people say that in a totally corny way, but I mean it. Some days you'll hate me like you hate your Daddy, but then my artists know they can call me for anything. I've dragged some of my artists' asses into rehab, I've been to some of my artists' weddings. Now if you want to know what I'm like to work with, I'll give you my cell phone and you can call Jeanette and Jorge from Mexican Summers, because I am godfather to their kids."

Doyle took a sharp breath and blinked at this. He had had that Mexican Summers poster hung in pride over his bed since he was a teenager. He practically worshipped Jorge Vincentes.

I had a thousand questions, but I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on my gut feeling, knowing that instinct was the thing to trust here. Dieter was rabbitting on about something else now, describing some impossible situation and artistic credibility and conflict of interest and how many angels could dance on the head of a Fender Twin. I had to decide quickly, because I couldn't carry on lying to Bebe about why my hours at work were suffering. Our initial breakfast had run over so long that I had completely missed the weekly phone call to Deltawave. I'd missed over hour of work, until I'd turned up panting and unwashed with the excuse of a broken down bus. I'd left early the next day to talk it through over supper with the band, then the next day I'd taken a two hour lunch to talk the contract through with our lawyer. I could not faff about over this, I had to decide now.

And then Gerry abruptly slapped his own forehead and delivered the clincher over takeaway pizza, late at night in his office where the band had gathered to talk one last time. "Oh! I almost forgot. We have a comprehensive insurance plan. All staff and artists are covered, both medical and dental. Your spouses and kids, too, in case any of you have any?"

Dieter grinned widely, showing his broken teeth. "That's it, I'm holding a gun to all your heads until your sign. I'd work almost anywhere to get a dental plan at this point."

So we signed, with pomp and ceremony appropriate for the occasion - us boys all dressed up in our gigging best, with a photographer that Pricilla recommended to document the ceremony - in the front booth of the Lacuna Lounge. Signatory for Musketeer Records: Gerry Warschultz. Signatories for Metropolis: Daniel J. Asheton, Jr; Doyle Alleyn Montague Saunders; Ricardo E. Sticciano; DIETER. (Dieter had been warned to sign with his full name, but refused on the grounds that there was only one Dieter in the East Village, and everyone knew who he was. "If I say Prince," he quipped "do you ask Prince who?") And then we all got so completely trashed that we drank until the bar closed, and then went across the street to my apartment and carried on drinking until the sun came up.

Two weeks later, Dieter reappeared, grinning widely, showing off his new mouth. Of course Dieter hadn't gone for anything discreet and natural looking. The right front of his mouth, top and bottom, was now a shining streak of metal, his new industrial silverwork glinting under the stage lights. It no longer just looked like rough trade, it looked industrial, maybe even vaguely steampunk, and the girls went wild for it. He added more metal to his stage outfit, trading the Iron Cross belt buckle for a large, bullet-studded bandolier, and moved his bass strap so that it hung down even lower, accessorising everything with chunky silver buckles that caught the light.

I, also, bought clothes, but I had the sense to buy my new suit at Domsey's Warehouse, though they had stopped selling clothes for $2 a bag, and now charged me a princely $10 for the whole outfit. Hey, I was signed now, I could afford it, I thought, and even splurged on getting the thing dry cleaned. It was the first article of clothing I'd bought since getting cut off on my 25th birthday, and I'd paid for it all myself. The bulk of my share of the small advance, I spent on guitars, adding a Gibson 330 to my Epiphone Casino, though I still couldn't afford a vintage sunburst, which was what I really wanted. I swapped out the ageing Sovtek era Big Muff, which at that point was more solder than wire, for a ProCo Rat distortion pedal, and exchanged some of my cheesier sounding digital pedals from Sam Ash for some Electro-Harmonix analogue equivalents from a boutique on St Marks Place.

 

\----------

 

But on the Monday morning after we were signed, with the remains of a 2-day hangover still throbbing in my temples, I went in to my office, to talk to Bebe. There was no way I could continue to work at the pace I had been keeping, and run my own band as a full-time concern as well. There had to be some way I could cut back my hours, or even hire an assistant or... something to make this impossible dilemma manageable.

But when I asked to speak to Bebe alone in her office, her eyes were grim, even before I told her what had happened. "Well, I'm glad that you decided to tell me yourself," she said, before I'd even said a thing. "Because I was not looking forward to pulling it out of you, and then doing what I now have to do."

"You already know?" I asked, surprised. The music business in New York City was a smaller, more self-contained world that I'd ever supposed, but apparently news travelled faster than even I had guessed.

She nodded slowly. "Musketeer. They're a good company. They'll treat you well - I wouldn't have parted with you for anything less."

"Parted with me?" Slowly, I realised that this was not a negotiation for fewer hours. "Are you firing me?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Daniel, I'm not firing you. You're resigning, and you'll get 30 days pay in lieu of working out your notice period, I'll see to that."

"What if I don't want to resign?" I could feel the panic rising.

"Come on, don't make this harder than it already is. In six months up here, you've worked harder and made yourself more valuable than that entire team out there. I didn't even know I wanted to hire you until you walked in here, but I am going to have a hell of a time replacing you. I'm probably going to have to hire two people just to do what you got done. But you cannot seriously think that you can go on working at the pace you were, and launch your own album as well?"

"No..." I agreed. "But I thought maybe I could go part time, or even take a sabbatical, or..."

"Conflict of interest, Daniel. You cannot work for us, while also accepting a paycheque from one of our competitors. I'm sorry, rules are rules and I can't bend this one for you." She stood up and walked round the front of the table, offering her hand for me to shake. "I'll accept your resignation, I'll sort out your severance package, I'll give you the best reference possible, and if, in ten years, after you've sold hundreds of thousands of records, you want to come back to Windlass, you can have my job. It has been wonderful working with you, Daniel, but..."

"But I'm still fired," I joked.

"You're not fired, you've got the best promotion in the world. Do you know how many A&R people dream of going off to play in a band? Make the most of it. Take this chance and wring it for all it's worth. I know, that of any person I have ever met, you are gonna work this for all you're worth - if you will allow yourself to take the chance. Now go! Clear out your desk and get out of here. Yes, you can take all of your promo CDs, but _not_ the computer or the scanner."

"Damn," I said, with a wry smile. I was about to exit the room, when suddenly I turned back to Bebe. "Actually, Bebe, can I just ask you a favour?"

"Sure thing, babe."

"Can you not tell Merry? I don't have a clue how I'm going to find the words, but I need to tell her this myself."

"OK, but Daniel? We both know she is going to be so damned proud of you that you don't have a thing to fear."

Carrying a large cardboard box filled with CDs, cassettes, magazines, press clippings and a large, rolled-up poster of Deltawave, I sat in the taxi downtown - now an impossibly unjustifiable expense - and wondered what the hell was about to happen to my life. All my dreams had come true - and yet after the end of this month, I had no clue how I was going to pay my rent. I no longer had a job. That dream job, A&R at Windlass Records, that I had lied and manoeuvred to get and been disinherited by my parents for sticking to, and then worked my butt off to keep, it was gone in a single move. But what a prize to surrender it for! A contract with Musketeer Records! But such an airy-fairy contract, with no salary, and no security, and nothing to guarantee anything except my own hard work and the fickle vagaries of indie fashion. Had I just gained the world, or sold my soul?

No, stop it. It was fine, I tried to tell myself. I had two last paycheques coming, two months' worth of rent. In two months' time we might have completed our album and gone out on tour. I could put my stuff into storage and sublet the apartment; Marge at the Pink Pony had been saying for years that if I ever gave it up, she was first on the list to take it. We could buy a van, we could live on the road. What happened next was entirely up to me. There was no Windlass, no manager, no parents, no five year plan to tell me what to do. It was all up to me, my cunning, my skill, my talent, and my little band of amazingly talented friends. So why was I so shit fucking scared?

Was this what Merry had been feeling, back on that fateful trip that she'd gone to put her own things into storage at her Mum's house? Was this feeling of... _weightlessness_ what had driven her into that desperate, insane game of Russian Roulette, trying to get pregnant by me? How might our lives have been different, had we actually succeeded? No single at number 6 on the Billboard Chart for her, no record contract with Musketeer for me? How old would our child be by now... and then I realised with a start that it would not yet even have been born. How quickly our lives changed, and how irrevocably.

I got home and glanced around my apartment, wondering how the hell I had managed to accumulate so much stuff in only 5 years, then dug through that stuff to find Deltawave's tour itinerary. Flipping through the pages, I found the current date, then looked up their schedule. They were supposed to be in a hotel that night, and it might be worth just calling and leaving a message for her to call me when she got in. That way, Windlass would pay the phone bill, not me. But no, my heart ached with a sense of confusion and fear that would only be allayed by the sound of her voice. So I looked up Cindy's cell phone number, and dialled, trying not to think of the phone bill.

"Hi, Cindy, it's Daniel. I need to speak to Merry, it's important."

"Hold on, boy-thing, she's with a journalist right now. Can I get you to hold for a minute or two, and I'll find out when they're gonna be through?"

"No no, Cindy, don't put me on hold. Never mind. Have her call me back - at home - when she's done. I'll wait."

"At home? Not at Windlass? I don't have that number; does she?"

She bloody well better, it's supposed to be her home, too, I thought, but gave it to Cindy anyway.

About 20 minutes later, as I just sat, staring at my record collection, counting the number of distinctive Musketeer logos I could see on the spines, my phone rang, and I leapt to answer it. Merry's voice, sounding so very far away down a bad long distance connection, both soothed my wildness and opened up whole reams of longing I could ill afford to measure. "Hey, it's me. Cindy told me it was important? Why are you at home? And how come you missed our conference call last week? What's up, are you OK?"

"I am OK, I am very OK, but I am also shit scared and bricking it, as you would say. Metropolis just got signed to Musketeer Records."

"Come again?" she asked. I couldn't quite tell if she just hadn't heard me due to the bad connection, so I repeated myself, more loudly. "Musketeer Records, as in Mexican Summers, Rec Tangle and Red Devils, Musketeer Records?"

"That's the one. We are now label mates with Mexican Summers." I repeated if as much to convince myself as her.

From the other end of the phone, a caterwauling noise emerged, that was either a terrible burst of static, or Merry whooping. "You're on Musketeer Records? Oh my fucking god! Daniel, you're a fucking rock star!"

"Your boy-thing is a rock star," I agreed, smiling sheepishly at my reflection in the mirror over the mantelpiece. I didn't feel like a rock star at that point, but my wild-eyed reflection, my too-long hair all standing on end, my tie askew, was starting to look like one. "I'm shitting myself."

"Don't be. Trust me on this one, it gets easier with practice. You're going to make a fucking amazing rock star. I daw you, I am so proud of you, oh my god, you did it, I always knew you would."

"I daw you, too." I had been so nervous, trying to think of ways to tell her so she wouldn't feel angry or envious or even let down that I could no longer do their A&R, that it had never even occurred to me that she might be delighted and proud. "But you do know this means I had to resign my job at Windlass. I can't be your A&R agent any more. I feel really sorry to let you down, and I hope you're not disappointed..."

"Daniel, who fucking cares," she laughed shocking me with how casually she dismissed my months of careful work. "I would be disappointed and let down if you had given our poxy A&R a second thought after getting a record contract on Musketeer. You've been amazing, really you have, I have just been knocked out by how much work you have done for us. But I know this is your dream come true. Live it, sweetheart, and just know that I'm proud of you."

And then we fell to giggling and making plans over what studio Metropolis were going to record in, and what producer we would use, and what we were going to call the first album, and hoping and planning and praying, that when Deltawave got big enough to headline their own tour - which, hopefully was going to happen soon, if Bebe had her way - they could bring along Metropolis as their support act. And when I got off the phone, I lay back on the sofa, just staring up at the cracked ballerina on my ceiling, and thinking that, between my band and my girlfriend, I was the luckiest man on earth.

Two weeks later, I had another call from Merry, in floods of apologies. "I am so sorry," she said. "I know I promised, but it's bloody Michael, that stupid manager of Elisha's. I wanted us to go on a small headlining tour, and take you along as our support. I begged, I pleaded..."

"Let me guess, Elisha said no."

"Not even. Michael has had an offer from - get this - Jezebel, to have us open for her on all three legs of her world tour. He won't let us turn it down, he says it's too lucrative. It's not even a buy-on, she will be paying us to do it. But..."

"But what? Merry, that's incredible. Jezebel is an amazing artist, and Bitch Goddess is totally a comeback return to form. You'll be playing stadiums. The amount of exposure... I wouldn't be surprised if you got your next single into the top ten on account of this."

"We're not... _ready_ to be playing stadiums."

"Sure you are. Hot damn, you are super-ready."

"I don't know that I will ever be ready to start playing stadiums. We are some weird little cabaret band that makes weird, creaky trip-hop from outer space. We have no business playing stadiums."

"No business? That doesn't sound like the Merry I know. Can't - or won't?" I was used to having to give pep talks like this to Merry when I'd been her A&R.

"Oh, Danny. I thought you might understand, but I guess you don't." She didn't even sound angry, just disappointed and a bit sad. I _hated_ when she got that tone to her voice, it made me feel about two feet tall.

"No, I don't understand why you don't want to be successful, sweetie." I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice, not entirely successfully. "If it were me, I would be totally stoked for the madness!"

"What if success comes at the price of trying to turn you into something you're not? Trying to dress me up in Jezebel's platform boots and turn me into another Kylie Minogue? That isn't who I am. I could see myself being more like... Bjork, or even a bass playing PJ Harvey. But this isn't me."

"Bebe thinks you have star quality. If Bebe thinks that you can be the next Jezebel, then I believe that you can be the next Jezebel, and you're just being over modest."

"Even Bebe is not sure it's a good idea. She thinks it might be too much, too soon, wrong audience, wrong move, but Michael has says if I don't do it, I'm out of the band."

" _What_?" My hackles went up at the sound of that. "Maybe Michael is the one that should be out of your band."

"But Michael is Elisha's creature, and Elisha loves Jezebel, he has fantasies of her pubescent fanbase, so we are doing it, ready or not. And Danny, really, I am not."

"When do you start? Will you be home at all between then and now?" I asked, feeling a strange sense of unreality. She named a week, about a month in the future... slap dab in the middle of the month we'd booked at the recording studio, an impossibly busy four weeks during which we had to record, mix and master our whole album. Time would be tight enough as it was. "Can you come out to the studio with us? It won't be much time together, but it'll be something."

"I can't..." she sighed. "You know it's not a good idea having partners in the studio."

"That's a dumb rule, and we're not having it," I insisted, still smarting at how I'd been excluded from the Deltawave sessions. And for what? I didn't even work for Windlass any more.

"I have a ton of stuff I will have to get done, and not much time to do it in, Danny. I have to go up and see my Mum..."

"Connecticut is closer to Massachusetts than New York City is," I reminded her petulantly. "Do you want to see me or don't you?"

"Why don't you fly out to California this coming week and spend a few days with me on tour?" she suggested. "If you're not at Windlass any more, you have no excuse not to. I'll even pay for your flight."

I sulked. "Maybe I have things to do, and not much time to do them in. I've got a whole apartment to break up, put into storage and sublet."

There was silence at the other end of the phone, followed by a sigh which somehow managed to convey more anguish than any words ever could.

"OK, I'll think about it. But it might have to wait until after we get out of the studio. Heck, I might come and see you on the Jezebel tour."

"Do you promise, Daniel Asheton?" Her voice sounded pregnant with longing.

"I promise," I assured her.


	18. Everything Changes (But You)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After an unexpected surprise visitor for Christmas, Metropolis decamp to suburban Connecticut to record their first album.
> 
> But once the album is finished, and hype over the band starts growing, Daniel is forced to make a decision which will alter the course of his life. What, ultimately, is more important to him, his band or his relationship? After losing his job and his apartment, can he really risk losing Merry as well?

Merry came home unexpectedly for exactly a week at Christmas. I had thought that Deltawave were going to spend the holidays out in LA as a kind of working holiday, but it seemed Merry had got the hump with Elisha and paid for her own ticket home. If I'd still been her A&R, I might have pushed the issue, might have rung Michael and tried to get to the bottom of it, but I had to remind myself: I didn't work for Deltawave any more. Merry was just my girlfriend, and as such, I was unconditionally pleased that she'd be spending at least part of her holiday with me. 

My apartment was already packed up and half in boxes, as Marge was going to move in on the 3rd January, but Merry and I somehow managed to camp out for a few days in the debris of my old life. And at the last minute, after receiving the OK from my Mum, I invited her to come up and spend Christmas Day with my family, in the old apartment on Central Park West. It was a big deal, and both of us knew it, but thankfully, she knew better than to make a big deal out of it. She just nodded her agreement, biting her lip with nerves or excitement, then went to ring her own Mum and tell her that she wouldn't be coming up to Williamstown until Boxing Day. And me, I was grateful for the distraction, as it was the first official family function I'd been to, since getting disinherited, and I wasn't entirely sure how to handle the occasion. Act as if nothing had happened, that was usually how my family handled all potentially awkward situations, but this was the first time that the awkward situation that everybody had to ignore was my own life.

Merry did me proud, dressed immaculately, in a white cashmere sweater-dress cut demurely to below her knees, and a pair of thick white woollen tights that made her look like a schoolgirl. She wound her hair up into a chignon and scrubbed her face of her usual rock chick make-up, looking about twelve years old as she perched on the edge of my parents' chesterfield sofa, clutching a glass of eggnog.

She won brownie-points with my mother by asking if she could help peel potatoes or anything, but Mrs Asheton - "Oh, please, it's Tamara" - laughed and said don't be silly, it's all catered, who can be bothered with cooking on Christmas? Still, it was nice to have another vegetarian at the table, so I didn't feel like such a bother to my parents' cook.

I watched, awe-struck, as Merry worked her magic on my father, drawing him out and getting him to explain the finer points of international currency exchange, the Double Dutch tax manoeuvre, and international holding companies in the Caribbean versus Switzerland. I knew my girlfriend hadn't the faintest interest in High Finance, but my father glowed under the attention, growing animated and even pouring her wine repeatedly.

After dinner, as we all moved through from the dining room into the living room, my father pulled me aside and laid a paternal arm across my shoulders, his red nose and his flushed cheeks showing that he was well under the eggnog himself. "Was that the one that Henry Lannings met?"

I wasn't sure how much Mr. Lannings had told my father, but decided that honesty was the best policy. "The very same."

"You're serious about her?"

"Very serious."

"I approve. You should get engaged very soon, if I were you. Don't make her wait. Nice girl. Very nice girl indeed." I was glad I didn't have to tell him that I wanted to marry her, but she had put me off. Then I wondered what my father would think, if he knew of Bennington's, but knew better than to enlighten him. "Much more suitable than anything your sister has brought home..." He looked over at Pricilla despairingly, where she and Merry were crouched by the tree, looking through the presents with the excitement of small children.

Presents were awkward. Merry was such a late addition that no one had time to buy anything for her, except for me, and I'd blown the last of my severance pay from Windlass on an exquisite pair of teardrop-shaped emerald earrings. She put them on, beaming with pleasure, and held back her hair to show them glowing by her jawbone. The rest of the family had indulged in their usual habit of expensive but perfectly useless gifts. My parents had splurged on an stupidly costly winter coat from Bergdorf Goodman for me, and I was more than slightly relieved to find the receipt and pricetags in the bottom of the box. Well, that would be going straight back to the returns department, as I could do with the cash way more than I could do with a ridiculous designer garment that wasn't even as warm as my parka.

As my mother drew the curtains and lit the candles, then put on the traditional Christmas Revels album, Merry asked for the loo. I waited a respectful amount of time, then shuffled after her, saying I was going to fetch something from my room. I caught Merry by the wrist as she exited the bathroom, and pulled her down the hall.

"Where are you taking me?" she laughed.

"I just wanted to show you my room." I had no idea why it was important, but I felt it was my last chance.

"Your childhood bedroom. Wow," Merry whispered, looking around at the walls, which had long since been redecorated, and the bookshelves, which still groaned with novels I'd read in high school, running her fingers over the spines. For a moment, she smiled, and pulled out a brightly coloured book emblazoned with psychedelic 1970s cartoons of puffins. "Oh my god, the Puffin Annuals. You had these too?"

"Oh yeah, I loved those when I was a kid. I read them until the bindings fell apart, as you can see."

As she flipped through the book, the binding came loose, spilling pages across the floor. Bending down, she retrieved them and quickly put the book back together, replacing the book back on the shelf with a sheepish grin before she could do any more damage. Then as she turned, catching sight of the view, she moved over to the window. My bedroom was round the side of our building, but if I craned my neck, it was still possible to catch a glimpse of the park.

"I knew your family were wealthy, but I had no idea," she finally whistled, when she was done staring.

"We're not _that_ wealthy," I protested, flopping back onto my bed. The Lannings family were far wealthier, living over on Fifth Avenue, just where it overlooked the eastern side of Central Park. I'd been in that apartment, back when we were in high school, and every single room had a full 180 degree view. And if you wanted to talk serious money, Fabrizio Tiberi, now _he_ came from a wealthy family. The rumour was, his parents owned an entire island in the Adriatic. In fact, when it came down to it, most of the other kids I'd run with at Collegiate, with the exception of perhaps Doyle Saunders - who was posh, but not exactly wealthy - had been way, way richer than me. Merry just turned and raised a disbelieving eyebrow at me, her emeralds sparkling in the dim light of sunset. How could she say so much, with just one tiny gesture? "OK, but we're not, like The One Percent wealthy. More like... top twenty percent?" The eyebrow went up a little further. "OK, maybe top fifteen?"

She rolled her eyes and turned back to the window. "I can't even imagine what it must have been like growing here." I bristled, preparing myself for yet another assault on the impossibility of my 'privilege', but the sadness in her tone of voice caught me by surprise. "There's no light, no fresh air, nowhere to run around. Where did you play?"

"Mostly in my own head." Reaching up, my hand caressed the dial of the old Roberts Radio that still held place of honour above my head. Oh, the chart battles that radio had borne witness to.

"What a lonely child you must have been," she said, running her fingers over the spines of the much-read books on my shelf.

"Not that lonely. I had my sister... Blandford Lannings... Doyle..." Raising myself onto my elbows, I gazed at her, then sat up. "Come here."

Leaving the books, she walked over and draped her arms loosely around my shoulders, caressing my hair and pulling my curls loose from where they were carefully slicked back. "I'm not going to screw you in your parents' house, if that's what you're expecting."

"Why not? I could eat you, so easily, for desert right now." I grinned up at her lasciviously, resting one hand on her ass, and as I pulled her body towards my face, I actually saw her eyes flicker, tempted - until at that moment, my sister came clattering down the hall, and we pulled guiltily apart.

"Come on, you two. Mum is about the do the Christmas pudding. You don't want to miss the lighting of the brandy."

She disappeared up to Williamstown the next day, and I started the slow process of putting my life into storage, leaving most of the things I didn't need at my parents' apartment, and stowing the rest in the spare room of my sister's apartment. Deltawave were off playing a very showy New Year's party in Palm Springs, so she disappeared on a red-eye flight, and I found myself going to the Lacuna Lounge's private party on my own, counting in the new year with Doyle and Fab and Phil Rocket Pops. The new year would _our_ year, we all swore, toasting another with champagne.

It had bloody well better be Metropolis' year, I thought to myself, stumbling back across the street to crash for the last time in my now-empty apartment. In a few days' time, we were starting work on recording our first album. And those few frenzied weeks were going to be the make or break moment for the rest of my life.

 

\----------

 

I had never focused so hard on anything in my entire life, as I focused on getting the Metropolis record made. I went into a kind of tunnel vision in that small studio, working with a single-minded fever that none of my bandmates could dislodge me from. No drugs, no alcohol, I insisted, just pints and pints of strong coffee until I found myself pacing up and down in the control room, chewing on the edge of my fingers as I listened intently to whoever was doing their take at that time. It helped that the village of Cranbury was out in the middle of nowhere, not even on a bus route (not that Connecticut had many buses.) It was a pain to get to, but once we were there, we were totally locked in, so we couldn't really leave, even if we wanted to, which obviously had its disadvantages, but it did really sharpen our focus.

It was a mid-range studio, not as cheap as the dump on 30th Street where we'd recorded Impediment, but nowhere near as nice as Barry Michael's set-up out at Catskills Mansions. The studio itself took up the top two floors of an old colonial house with low ceilings and doors Dieter had to duck to get through. Above a small apartment and kitchen where Terry, the engineer, lived, it had a recording room and a mixing console on the second floor, with a sleeping loft above. There, between takes, we slept, played videogames and argued about whose turn it was next. The mixing room, where we spent the majority of our time between takes, was small, and cramped, with wood-panelled walls, and the recording room soon started to smell like a boys' locker room, despite the Nag Champra we burned incessantly, but the lack of any amenities totally focused us on our music.

Working under straitened circumstances, the way we'd come to expect after recording at UnderPony and 30th Street, we all went in together and laid down the backing tracks very quickly. Our engineer tried to keep the energy high and the mood fresh; if we couldn't nail a song in three takes, he would suggst that we move on immediately to another track. But we'd been playing these songs for so long that they didn't need endless iterations. Take two was almost always the best. 

Gerry had made some suggestions as what producers we might want to work with, but as soon as we started getting stuff down on tape, I knew we had made the right decision. We didn't need a producer; we already knew exactly what we were doing and what we wanted to sound like. A producer would only distract us from this single-minded intensity.

Doyle wanted to record every song we had, so that we a ton of material to choose from when we went to mixing, but I nixed that. We couldn't afford the luxury of time. We were doing 15 songs, maximum - 11 for the album, plus 2 sets of B-sides - and I'd made a list of our best candidates. Doyle shrugged and gave in, but Dieter snatched the list out of my hand, scratched a couple of titles out, and replaced them with other songs. When he dropped the sheet back onto my lap, I regretfully had to admit that Dieter's choices worked better than mine.

I was so stressed out about the time thing that I drew up a schedule and pinned it to the door of the control booth. Recording backing tracks, 2 songs a day for 7 days; overdubs, 2 songs a day for 7 days; mixing, one song a day for 14 days. But when I left to go downstairs and make another pot of coffee, I came back to find that someone had scribbled and drawn giant cocks all over the take sheet. Giant cocks that soon acquired Hitler hairdos and silver teeth. OK then, Dieter. We would work at whatever pace we worked. When the backing tracks were all recorded in only 5 days, I started to relax a little, and maybe even kick back and enjoy the process.

Dick and I were total pros with the overdubs. Both of us just went into the iso booth, put our headphones on, then studiously whacked out our takes in one or two passes. I had spent years honing my guitar tone; I knew exactly what settings to use on my amp, where to place the mics to perfectly capture the reverb in stereo, and what distortion pedals to use for which solo. I had been waiting for this my entire life, and though I knew that there were musicians who got in the studio and spent literally a whole week trying out every channel on the mixing board to get just the right vibe (I had heard rumours about who, exactly, had done this on the Deltawave sessions, Elisha Diamond) I sat down and tracked my takes one after another with the ruthless efficiency of a man who had been playing guitar solos into my four-track since I was 13 years old. 

Like a lover, I felt my way through every guitar solo, though to be honest, I rarely took solos, as I don't really believe in showing off like that. I believe in well-crafted riffs that wove so carefully into the fabric of the songs that you barely even noticed them, though removing one note would make the whole spiderweb of a song fall apart. But the last song, the ecstatic set closer, _Into The Arms Of Heaven_ , that song required a solo, and a blistering drone-out storm of a solo at that. So I warmed my amp up perfectly, turned all my pedals on, adjusted the tone levels to orgasmic, then felt for the solo, imagining that the guitar was my lover. I could feel the note, just there, imagining my picking finger pushed up inside Merry, feeling for her G-spot, trying to drive her crazy. Push, push, push, right on the note, then slide just off, imagining her catching her breath for a crazed moment before sliding back onto the note with redoubled force, timing it just so against the beat of the song as if it were her heartbeat, thrust, thrust, release, and I imagined her face twisting with orgasm as I let my fingers slide back down the neck into the main riff.

When I stopped playing and opened my eyes, all three of my bandmates were standing up by the window, staring at me, open-mouthed, the light glancing off Dieter's new silver incisors. Leaning down to push the talkback button, Doyle smirked at me. "Hot damn, Daniel! That was... I'm ever so slightly jealous of your girlfriend now. Do you always make those faces when you come...?"

I laughed and removed my guitar from around my neck, flexing the cramping muscles of my forearm carefully. My fingers were all bent out of shape from non-stop playing, with deep, callused grooves down the centre of my fingertips exactly the size and shape of my guitar strings. "Ha ha, you'll have to ask Merry."

Dieter, of course, was a drama queen. He didn't actually need to do many overdubs, as the scratch bass had come out perfectly usable with the EQ tweaked a bit, but instead he insisted on dragging out the studio's collection of keyboards and adding dramatic swoops and filter sweeps and random string arrangements to most of the songs. I was irritated at first, and just wanted him to leave them out and get on with it, because, apart from how long it was taking, how the hell were we ever going to duplicate bloody keyboard solos live? But again, the moment I listened back to the rough mixes I had to admit that Dieter was right. Even when you couldn't actually hear the keyboards beyond a vague wash in the background, they needed to be there.

Finally, it came time to do the vocals. This was where it started to get fractious. Although we were actually ahead of schedule, I knew that the vocals were the single most important thing that could make or break a record. Doyle was nervous, and kept fucking things up, getting half a take down, then losing his concentration in the middle of a verse. Instead of keeping his cool and keeping going, so we could punch in the missing flubbed bit, he would rip off his headphones and stomp around the studio, shouting "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" and slapping himself in the forehead. The song was called _Rated: Frustrated_ , but really, that was a bit too much on the method acting, I thought.

Sitting at the mixing desk, I pushed the talkback button and leaned forward to try to catch his attention. "Come on, Doyle, let's try that again. You were fine."

Pacing back and forth for a few more minutes, Doyle went back to his bag, dug out a baseball cap and stuck it on his head, slicking back his hair underneath it and pulling the brim low, before retrieving his headphones and propping them up on top, one over his ear so he could hear his own recorded voice, the other loose so he could hear himself in the room. "OK, OK..." he whispered to the neuman vocal mic. "But... do you think I sound... _jaded_ enough on that last line?"

I let go of the talkback button, and exchanged eyerolls with Terry. Our engineer had been holding back any kind of judgement on the band's music or behaviour, which I truly appreciated most of the time, but that eyeroll told me everything I needed to know. I bristled, but still, Doyle had to be taken in hand. Punching the talkback button, I calmly said "Dude, just go with it."

"Just go with it," Doyle agreed, and nodded, taking a deep breath before giving Terry the thumbs up that he was ready to go again.

I put my head down on the mixing desk, closing my eyes and listening intently to the song, the way the guitar and the drums locked tight, and the bass wandered between them. Doyle's vocals were supposed to skitter nervously over the top, filled with frustration and bratty resentment, but he kept stumbling over a tricky line in the second verse. The control room door opened and closed, but I didn't raise my head, figuring it was just Dieter or Dick coming up from the kitchen downstairs. Yes, Doyle was sounding a lot better this time, the sexual frustration in his voice straining against the tight constraints of the grid-like rhythm, as he nailed the first verse then soared up into the second - YES! The tricky rhyme tripped off his tongue easily and he tumbled into the chorus. This was the take, this was absolutely _the_ take. Next single, I thought to myself, losing myself in the choppy current of the song.

Someone touched me on the shoulder, but I ignored them, concentrating on the music as if I could will myself into it by pressing my forehead against the mixing desk. The touch became a gentle rub, then another hand joined in on my other shoulder, massaging away tension I had been feeling building in my back all afternoon. Whoever that was, it was nice, but I was concentrating wholly on the performance that Doyle was delivering in the other room, his bratty sneer giving way to an inarticulate tantrum of sexual frustration as the guitars built to a crescendo. Fuck yes, I loved my band, this was everything I had ever wanted music to be. As Doyle finished the song with an anguished yelp, I sat up slowly, clapping my hands in mime to show that _yes, this was the one_. Terry was giving the thumbs up next to me, even as he let the tape roll out a bit before he stopped it, to avoid an audible click, and from the back of the room, I could hear cheering from Dick and even Dieter whistling his approval.

Hang on. If Dick and Dieter were in the back of the room, who was rubbing my shoulders? I turned my chair slowly, and looked up into the sea green eyes of Merry.

"Merry! You made it!" I stood up, my relief at nailing the track completely forgotten. "How did you... when did you..."

"I'm just on my way up to stay with my Mum for the weekend. But you're right, Connecticut is closer to Massachusetts than New York City is. Figured I might as well drop in. And I'm glad I did, because you guys are sounding so... fucking... brilliant."

I stood and grinned at her, my pleasure at finishing the track diluted yet compounded by her sudden appearance. "Thanks... I..."

The door to the recording room burst open, and Doyle appeared in the room, throwing his arms around Merry and hugging her. I frowned. I hadn't even got a hug yet. Why did Doyle deserve a hug? And why had Doyle suddenly hit exactly the right note of sexual frustration, when Merry had come into the room? I still hadn't forgotten those weird comments about being jealous of my girlfriend over the guitar solo. Jealousy coursed through me like a stab of anguish.

But Doyle pulled away from Merry and winked. "Thank fuck you're here. Please, can you take your other half out to dinner or just drag him off to a motel and give him a good seeing to, because he is driving me _nuts_!"

"Hey!" I protested, but Doyle was already rolling a cigarette.

"You think I don't see you through the glass, tapping your fingers on the mixing desk, glaring at me when I get things wrong, rolling your fucking eyes at me when I ask if I'm doing OK, but still... I know I'm gonna get a bollocking if I screw this up?" Doyle's tone was light, like he was joking, but I could tell, really he wasn't. "Please. This was the first take I got right, cause it was the first take I couldn't see little Asheton beady-eyes glaring at me through the glass. Take him away, Merry, take him away."

"I'm sure he's not that bad," Merry laughed, taking my hand and squeezing it gently. "But if you can spare him for the evening, yes I would love to have him."

I picked my blazer off the back of my chair, and shot Doyle a filthy glance as I followed Merry out of the room. "Ooh, death-glare Asheton, knocking me so so super-dead, party people in house, hot damn!" Doyle moaned, pulling a zombie face.

"Fuck you, Doyle." We had been in the studio for far too long.

"In fact, for real. Can all of you guys get out? Dick? Dieter? I'm not being an asshole, but can you just go upstairs or something. I'm feeling really weird about this whole set-up." Doyle pulled off his baseball cap, scratched his head like a puppy then replaced it. "And no more coffee for him, OK, Merry, because if he gets any more caffeine in his system, that one vein in his forehead is gonna explode?" he called after us.

And so we all trooped out of the studio, Merry and I headed for the door as Dick and Dieter raced for the videogame console. "Are you guys alright?" she asked as I trailed her down the stairs. "I know it can get kind of intense in the studio."

"He's just kidding around. We're... doing really well, actually," I admitted as I plucked my parka off the hook by the door, then the two of us trooped outside into the slushy snow. "Is that your car?" I nodded towards the flashy rental sitting in the driveway.

"Yeah, but hang on a minute?" She grabbed my hand as I moved towards the car, and pulled me back towards her. Before I could protest, she had shoved me, roughly, up against the wall of the house, and brought her mouth down on mine, hard, almost crushing me with the weight of her kiss. And as I returned it, thrusting my tongue deep into her mouth, feeling for the familiar silk of her hair with my hands on the back of her neck, I felt myself turning to jelly inside.

And then suddenly, I was angry. How could she do this, how could she just _go away_ for months, then just appear at random, in the middle of the most inconvenient time of my life - and still turn my knees to jelly, just by kissing me? Breaking the kiss, I pulled back and stared at her, but she remained just as beautiful, maybe even more beautiful than the last time I had seen her, as if seeing so many odd, projected television-magazine-billboard versions of her in the interim had made the actual living, breathing girl a more fantastical and impossible creature.

She looked straight into my eyes, as if seeking an answer, then her breath steamed in the cold as she breathed, "Daniel, I love you."

It hit me like a blow in the solar plexus, something that shuddered all the way through me. "You mean, like gorgonzola cheese, and your parents, and Echo and the Bunnymen?" I teased, trying to cover the way I failed to process my own emotions. But when I saw the expression on her face suddenly fall, all the confidence draining out of her eyes, I moved forward and kissed her softly. "I missed you so much," I told her quietly. "I... I love you, too."

At that, she smiled again. "You didn't miss me, you guys were having a blast in the studio, weren't you?" I nodded sheepishly. "So what do you want, the restaurant meal, or a quickie in a motel?"

"Would you hate me if I said restaurant meal? It's... well, it's kinda weird, to be honest. Not seeing you for months at a time, and then you just turning up unexpectedly and..." I shrugged, unable to articulate the weirdness of the situation in any meaningful way. When she was away, she became a symbol in my mind, an ideal, almost a muse, and now the flesh and blood girl stood in front of me, I needed to grasp my way back to reality again.

"Performance anxiety?" she giggled, taking my hand and leading me to her car.

"No... not performance anxiety, just..." I let her unlock the door and climbed into the passenger seat. "Making an album is a really emotionally intense experience. I think I just kinda want to talk to you instead of jumping right into really emotionally intense sex."

"Yeah, I know, it is fucking intense," she agreed, putting the car into gear. "That's why Barry made us work only 8 hour days and take the weekends off, go spend time with our partners and shit. I never told you how much I appreciated you coming up every weekend. That was really great."

I smiled at the memory. "That _was_ really great."

"Do you think there's any vegetarian restaurants in this shitty little town?"

"No, but they do bean curd at the Chinese, let's go there."

"I feel like I've been taking you for granted," she confessed. "Since you don't do our A&R any more, and I don't speak to you as often. I miss you. I want to stop taking you for granted."

"I don't feel taken for granted, I just feel... hugely fucking busy with 18 hours of Metropolis a day."

"Tell me about it, OK?" She pulled into the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant, then turned to look at me, studying me carefully, inspecting me, flicking an unruly curl back from my forehead. "Pretend we're on our second date, down on Sixth Street again. Tell me all about how your band sucks, then I'll tell you all about how my band sucks."

"Deal," I told her, and we walked in together, holding hands.

We ate dinner, and just talked, for two hours straight, swapping gossip and tit-bits and complaints back and forth. No, I hadn't been lying; Christ, how I missed her. But this was what I missed, the easy shop talk, and the support, and the commiseration of someone who knew exactly what I was going through with music at any given moment. There was a weird symmetry to the conversations, like now we were each having the other half of conversations we'd had back when Deltawave were in the studio, and I had been talking her down when she was climbing the walls. In some ways, it felt strange, like the shoe was on the other foot. When Deltawave had first got signed, I had known so much more about Windlass and their processes, because I'd worked there, and I could take her by the hand and guide her through. But now there were bits about being an artist, and surviving being in the studio that she knew so much better than I did, and she was talking me through that process.

I was slightly drunk when we left, but she stayed sober, to drive, and I found myself reminding her, hey, what about that motel idea, and she turned and looked at me with such a wicked grin that I found myself getting hard all over again. But we drove around for about 20 minutes, and couldn't find a motel. So in the end, she parked up at the end of a long, wooded lane out of sight of the village, leaned over the gear shift to kiss me, then reached down, unbuttoned my flies, and gave me a handjob.

A handjob! Jesus Christ, what was I, 17 years old in a dark stairwell in Dalton Academy? And yet, as I looked over and saw Merry's face, her gaze intent upon me in the dark, biting her lip with concentration as her fingers worked on my cock, I felt myself draw near to orgasm, and then spurt all over her fingers. I lay back against my seat, my head reeling, trying to catch my breath, then dug in the pocket of my jacket for a napkin for her to wipe her hand on.

"We let it go too long, this time," I told her. "I'm coming to see you, on the Jezebel tour."

"You better," she said, and normally she would have said this with a laugh, but her voice was oddly flat.

I turned to look at her. "What are you thinking, you look distracted."

"I was trying to work it out, when we got together. It was, like... the second, or maybe third week of January? I can't remember."

I cast my mind back. It seemed like another lifetime ago. "Yeah, it was early January, I don't have my diary with me, or I could tell you the date..."

She pursed her lips, concerned. "Danny, it's just gone February."

"Oh god, are you going to give me shit if I don't get you a valentine?" I teased.

"We've been together a year." Her words hung in the air after she said them. It felt like we'd only been seeing one another for a few weeks - and yet it seemed like a decade's worth of events had passed since that gig at the Lacuna Lounge.

"Wow." It seemed so inadequate.

"You better get out of this car, or I'm going to kidnap you and drive you up to my Mum's house."

"And we're not even allowed to share a bed there." I didn't want to drive back to the studio, and when we got there, I didn't want to get out of the car either. I didn't want to let the evening end, let the moment go, without letting her know... I didn't even know what I wanted to tell her. _You turn me inside out. But I don't know which is the real me, the one I am with you, or the one I become when I'm locked up in Metropolis' studio bubble._ So I kissed her softly, and slid my tongue between her teeth, then told her that I dawed her, and watched, again, as she drove off into the night. These snatched moments, were they ever really going to be enough?

I let myself back into the house, hung up my parka, then leaned back against the door, just listening to the music spilling down through the floor from upstairs. Even muffled, from a room away, it sounded amazing, urgent and spikey, a short, sharp bomb of an album. Please let this happen, I thought to myself. Please let this album be as great as I believe it to be, please let Musketeer believe it, too, please let the public buy it, please let me be at least as successful as... as I need to be to stop feeling like a disappointment compared to my girlfriend.

Then I took a deep breath, and walked upstairs, and was astonished to find how much work Doyle had managed to get done without me.

Mixing the album... Christ, if I thought recording albums was a difficult, painful mess of squabbling and compromise well, mixing was a whole other layer of hell. Over, and over, and over we listened to the songs, dozens, maybe hundreds of times in a row, with Terry endlessly fiddling over the faders, making minute adjustments in the EQ of various drums I didn't even know had got their own track. But slowly, brutally, we bashed it into shape. Doyle was impossible, he kept wanting to bury his own vocals and turn everything else up. Dieter, well, Dieter wanted to remix everything his own way. He was happy to turn up the vocals, but he pushed all the guitars down to almost subliminal levels, and boosted the bass until the speakers shook and Terry intervened. Dick, however, Dick had a good ear for mixing albums, and the patience to actually listen out to Doyle and Dieter without ever really agreeing with either of them.

And finally, about a week and a half, and a thousand listens later, it was all done, in record time, under budget (we'd expected to have to sleep in a hotel, but we'd actually been fine, sleeping in bunkbeds in the loft) and on schedule. I loaded up the tapes in a box to deliver to Gerry for mastering, as Terry burned us four copies of the CD, so we could squabble over the track order. As I held the shiny silver disc in my hands, I realised I was actually shaking. My album. Metropolis' album. We had finally made it happen.

I had thought I would never want to hear any of those songs ever again, but of course, we all listened on the car stereo on the drive back to New York. There really was some special thrill, hearing your own music in the car, speeding along with the skittering hi-hats and driving basslines. It really made me appreciate Terry's skill as an engineer, hearing the way that the guitars still cut through, over the road noise, yet without drowning out the vocals. Back in the studio, it had seemed vaguely absurd the way Terry kept switching between the good, big, crisply defined studio speakers, and a pair of shitty little speakers, trying things out on Walkman headphones, before taking the mixes downstairs to check how they sounded on the tinny personal stereo in the kitchen. But as I heard the songs echoing out from the car stereo, I finally appreciated the attention to detail.

Since Marge was now subletting my flat, I had made arrangements to stay with my sister, taking over her tiny spare room until I went on tour, so I had the boys drop me uptown. Although it wasn't anywhere near as bad as, y'know, moving back in with my parents, it still felt weird to be back on the Upper West Side. I didn't dare stay out late, when I knew my sister had to be up early for school the next day, and certainly didn't invite any of the boys back, no matter how much she dropped hints about that attractive Doyle Saunders.

Finding her awake at the kitchen table, I surprised her with the disc, and she made me put it on, clapping her hands with joy before reaching over to ruffle my shaggy hair. "Daniel, you know, this is actually _good_."

"Did you really expect anything less?"

"No, I mean, this is _really_ good. This is not just, yeah, big it up because it's your little brother here. This is, like, music I would expect to hear on the radio good. I'm going to tell all my friends to buy this!" She beamed with pride, and I felt my chest swelling. Until I stopped to think about that.

"Wait, hang on, does this mean you never actually liked all my other demos?"

 

\----------

 

Our friends loved the record. Charlene at the Lacuna claimed even the rough mix of the record had been magical. We'd made her a copy to get her opinion, and she said that every time she even put that disc on, the bar instantly filled up with people, buying beers and wanting to know what that music was. It was an auspicious omen, we decided, and I joked about conducting a study to see which song promoted the fastest beer consumption in order to pick the next single. _Rated Frustrated_ , Charlene told us, confirming what I'd thought, that night back in the studio with Merry. People drank the taps dry when she put that song on, she said, even on a slow night.

Musketeer were delighted with the album, and wanted to move the release date up. That was a surprise to me - Windlass would never even consider less than a 3 month lead time on an album release, and preferably a 6 month lead time if the band weren't reliable enough to deliver an album on time. I understood all the pieces that had to be manoeuvred into place now, magazine reviews to be negotiated, tours to be planned, distribution to be sorted out, and I grilled Gerry on all of it.

The four of us had been pretty unanimous on the album title: _Lights! Camera! Action!_ It had been our pre-gig rallying cry for years, but also, yeah, punctuation in album titles was cool. We all liked its cinematic associations. The silent film theme was something we wanted to work with through our whole image, the gangster suits, the bold typefaces, even Dieter's pancake stage makeup. What about the album cover and the liner notes? Dieter had sorted out the album art, a 1920s shot of an empty theatre stage at the Bauhaus school in Germany, in the same black and red colour scheme that he'd once done our flyers in. He carried on the whole 1920s Weimar theme through the rest of the album art, with sans serif lettering and a moody black and white shot of the band, looking like silent film stars as we shivered at the end of a pier in Queens, with the Manhattan skyline in the background.

But the liner notes - we argued back and forth on including lyric sheets until Doyle nixed them. Too much like those horrible, pretentious poetry magazines, he claimed, though really, I thought he was probably just still sore about the tiny pay. (Also, well, as much as I hated to admit it, we were trying to keep costs down by having a single folded insert slip, instead of a booklet. As much as Dieter wanted the extra pages for his collages, it was insane how it doubled the printing cost to get staples in a CD cover! That was something that had never even come up at Windlass because DGI had its own printing plant.) And thank you lists? Would we thank our girlfriends? Our families? Our record companies? Would it be really impolitic to thank Bebe Newcolm but not thank Charlie at Three Square? Oh, fuck it. In the end we decided to keep the information as basic as possible, just our names and the simple declaration "thank you". We'd put all of our emotions into the record already. If the music was good enough, let it speak for itself. Minimalist to the core, that was us. But still, at every step of the process, I bombarded Gerry with questions, complaints and observations, as if making up for all the time I'd spent on the other side of A&R, at Windlass.

Gerry just kept laughing every time I caught myself slipping into Windlass mode, and I couldn't figure out if Gerry blatantly resented it as meddling, or if he was actually quite glad that I was taking an interest. But I wanted to be involved in every aspect of the record's release. There was a part of me that almost missed ringing up magazine editors and asking so casually if we could get another 200 words of feature if the record company bought a half page ad. But apparently Musketeer didn't do things that way, and Gerry hooted with laughter when I suggested maybe they should. Still, I liked going down to the Musketeer offices 2 or 3 times a week, just for something to do, as unemployment really wasn't suiting me, and there was only so long I could hang around my sister's flat by myself, or impose on Doyle. I only talked to Merry once a week, over the phone, snatched moments from an insane-sounding tour, but we'd started to discuss the dates that I would come to visit. We'd settled on Mexico, as it would be almost like a holiday. After the slush-filled, half-frozen New York winter, I could really do with seven days in the sun.

And then one day, I walked into Musketeer to find Gerry grinning at me, turning a letter round and round in his hands before handing it over with a decisive nod. "So I've finally figured a way to get you the fuck out of my office and stop you back-seat driving my record company. How do you boys fancy a little trip to England?"

"England?" I stuttered, but when I saw the header on the letter, I nearly dropped it. "John Peel? As in, _the_ John Peel, of the radio show? Wants _us_?"

"You know he played the bejesus out of the Impediment EP so it seemed only fit to send him over the mixes of your new album. He's quite keen for you to come over and do a session. With that kind of recommendation, I figure we can book enough gigs over there to keep you out of my damn hair for... oh a good 2 or 3 weeks. Maybe a month if we can get you some European dates."

"John Peel. A European tour," I repeated dumbly, barely able to process it. "Oh my god! When do we leave?"

With a massive grin, Gerry named the suggested dates, and I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. Of course. Of fucking course. It was slap bang over the week I had agreed to spend in Mexico with Merry.

"Why are you even considering this?" raged Dieter, when I raised the dilemma at the next rehearsal. "There is no fucking snatch in the world that is worth giving up a Peel Session for."

I looked over at Doyle for support, but he shook his head. "Dan, you know I think of Merry as my fucking sister. But no. That's nuts. We do the UK tour."

Dick was the only one of them who seemed even remotely understanding. "Danny, man, that is one hell of a heavy load, and I don't know how I'd ever be able to explain it to Jessica, if I were in your position. But I am not in your position and... I wanna go to fucking England!"

I was outvoted and that was it.

Desperately, I tried to explain it to Merry over the phone, knowing full well that I would probably be dumped. This was it, this was the end. A year's relationship, up in smoke... but a fucking Peel Session? Was it worth it? Everyone else seemed to think it was.

And Merry, bless her, but curse her, she didn't get mad, in fact, she actually had the good graces to sound excited for me, which somehow only made it worse. "A Peel Session? Oh my god, I'm fucking jealous. We never got to do a Peel Session. You guys are way cooler than we will ever be."

"Yeah, well, we never got to open for Jezebel," I teased, and she laughed. "But Merry... the problem is _when_." I told her the dates and waited for her reaction.

"If you say you are even considering blowing off a fucking Peel Session to come see me in Mexico, I will personally fly back to NYC tonight and kick your fucking arse. Are you fucking kidding me? _Go_."

"You're not angry? You're not disappointed?" There was a part of me that, for once, wanted her to say that she was angry, that she was disappointed, that she wanted me more than my band did. Because I was starting to feel slightly angry and disappointed that she was neither.

"Honestly, it's fine. You do not get another chance to do a Peel Session. You can always fly out and visit me in... shit, I don't even know where we are headed after South America. Japan? Australia? Somewhere. You can visit me out there, can't you?"

I should have pressed her. I should have got her to go and fetch her itinerary and look it up, where she would be when I got back from my European tour. I should have made the effort to find out, to schedule a trip, to make a last-ditch attempt to catch up with her. But I didn't. I was so distracted over my own record and my own tour, and Pricilla was going to be home at any moment and I didn't want her to catch me driving up her long distance phone bill. Then Cindy was calling Merry at the other end, and we just said goodbye to one another without scheduling the next phone call. And that was the worst mistake of my life, because she plummeted out of my life. I never thought that was how our relationship would end, I always thought it would be one of those terrible fights, or worse, those awful moments where Merry just went a bit sad and tired and said in that despairing "no no no no no" voice that we should take a break. I was too busy to think of that phone call as a final break-up, but that was what it was. It really was over between us. We never caught up in South American or Japan or wherever; we just didn't see each other again.


	19. Lights! Camera! Action!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And finally, it all starts to happen for Daniel, as Metropolis fly to England to play a Peel Show, launch their debut album, and do a proper European Tour.
> 
> As Musketeer Records send them out on tour with their teenage idols, the newly single and somewhat sheepish Daniel finds himself involved in his first ~groupie experience~. Daniel has survived being in an unsuccessful band for four years... can he survive having actual _fans_?

It was the single most hectic year of my entire life. _Lights! Camera! Action!_ didn't even begin to cover the flurry of activity we were thrown into, non-stop for the next 18 months. As I had once told Merry, bands always think that signing a record deal means the end of the struggle, job done, when really it means the struggle has only just begun.

We flew to England, which was weird, and exciting, and both familiar but completely alien, because I had not been there since I was 14. I had been freaking out a bit about how much it as all going to cost, but one of my cousins came to the rescue, lending us her basement flat in Chalk Farm as our London base of operations. It was a bit of a walk from the tube, but close enough to Camden to really feel like we were in the heart of everything. We did the Peel Session, and tore up the Maida Vale studio with the blistering fury of our music. We had our own damn feature in the NME new bands section, separate from Deltawave, separate from the Ludlow St Scene, with a huge, full colour photo of the four of us hanging out of a London taxi cab, though the feature itself was a bit weird, making rather a bit too much of our indebtedness to Dead Letters. But still! A two-page spread in the NME! Hot damn, that was something to write home about!

We did a quick, two-week tour of the UK, and played Manchester and Liverpool and Brighton and all these legendary cities that I could name a hundred amazing bands from. The hectic days slipped by too quickly to even write about in my diary, motorways and transport cafes and endless identical backstage dressing rooms followed by trying desperately to find a cheap hotel (and hoping no one in the band would try to volunteer our hotel room for an all-night party as happened once, in Sheffield, thank you Dieter.) I did my best to collect postcards from every city, sending some to my sister and some to my Mum, wanting desperately to send some to Merry, but the last address I had for her was the apartment I had just given up. I'd say I missed her, but I simply did not have the time. On the rare occasion we got an afternoon to ourselves, we did some sight-seeing, hell, we even did the guided Smiths tour in Manchester, the Salford Lads' Club and the hairdresser who claimed to have done Morrissey's towering quiff. I couldn't help myself, I gave in to Doyle's needling and got my hair cut there, though granted, a quiff did not look as good on me as it had on Moz. My hair went so impossibly curly in the humid British air it would stand up straight for an inch or so, then cascade off into frizz. Dick took incessant polaroids to try and pin the memories down - a shot of Dieter outside the Hacienda Club, a shot of Doyle and I posing under the barrel-roof of the Cavern Club in Liverpool, the three of us eating ice cream on the beach in Blackpool - but everything else just sped by in a beer-fuelled blur.

Once back in Chalk Farm, we visited MTV in Camden to hawk our new video, which we had filmed in an afternoon in a rough-looking Brutalist estate outside Nottingham. Then went drinking at the Good Mixer afterwards, and yes, Graham Cooper was there, and I managed to exchange about three words with him. But that whole night was completely weird, because the Good Mixer didn't feel like a genuine working musicians' hangout bar like the Lacuna Lounge, it felt like some kind of ersatz Disneyland facsimile of a 'Camden Pub' full, not of musicians, but of tourists staring at Graham Cooper. And Cooper, though he was clearly doing his best to try to appear normal, still wearing his same shabby parka and second hand vest, still sporting his distinctive NHS specs with a bit of tape on one arm, had a caged look in his eye that reminded me uncomfortably of zoo animals. Cooper did not look like he was enjoying fame; he looked like fame was an uncomfortable prison that had been thrust upon him. As Doyle and I left the pub, just before midnight, I had an inescapable urge to ring Merry and tell her about it, to ask her if Cooper had seemed normal when she'd met him... but of course, I had no idea where Merry was and no way of getting in touch with her, even if I did.

As my cousin was flying out to Hong Kong for a month to visit her boyfriend, leaving us the run of her place, Metropolis were still in England when _Lights! Camera! Action!_ officially came out. (I mean, god knows how we could have afforded the trip if I didn't have family in London - Musketeer provided us with "tour support" so we had actually turned a small profit on the UK tour, but they did not provide us with "hang around London for a couple of weeks chatting up the British press" support.) We celebrated the album launch with a small party in a bar in West London, near Musketeer's UK office, at the top of a warehouse they seemed to share with half the other hip record labels in London. I had wanted to play a gig, maybe even at the infamous Camden Barfly where Blur had been signed off the back stage, but my bandmates all put their collective feet down. They wanted to celebrate in style - really, just get wasted on someone else's tab - so our London live debut was put off for a month. 

The party was kinda surreal, or maybe I was just a mess of nerves and that strong Belgian beer that everyone plied us with. Someone blasted our record, almost deafeningly loud, over the PA, while I tried to shout into people's ears about how much this all meant to me. The booze flowed freely, and the bar staff seemed to just look the other way as a Well-Connected Someone chopped out lines of coke on a table near the back. Jesus! Even in New York, no one was that blatant! But in London, no one even blinked. "Private party," the Well-Connected Someone shrugged, offering me a line, but Dieter cut in ahead of me with a wink and a charming smile. I demurred after that - I mean, someone had to stay straight enough to work. After all, everybody in the room seemed to be a journalist, or a publicist, or worked for a record company or booking agent, or was otherwise involved with the music industry. For a terrible moment, I wished for the old days, when I still had a Windlass business card so I could schmooze properly. Because that night, when I told people I was in the band, the band whose drinks they were necking, the band whose album they were supposed to be listening to, their attention would wander and they'd go off looking for the editor of Q Magazine or whoever. I'd always thought The Artist was the top of the pile! Jeez, if two years of working at Windlass hadn't disabused me of that notion, a week in the London music industry sure did.

But the minute the free booze ran out, the bar emptied out as if someone had rung the fire alarm, people leaving in clumps, groups of 4 or 5, until there was no one left in the venue except Metropolis and the people who worked for us. I had never seen people drink quite so fast as on a music industry free bar! Obviously there had been people blatantly taking the piss - I heard one guy order "16 vodka and cokes" for a party of four. But it still shocked me how fast people drank in England. They would chug their beers while I sipped, expecting to be in for a marathon and not a sprint - but then I always got caught out with an empty glass at ten past eleven, as the landlord called time, and I expected to have another 3 or 4 hours of drinking ahead of me! As we got chucked out into the street, Roger, Gerry's man in London, winked and told us he knew a place with a late licence, some dodgy Greek restaurant that would keep the retsina flowing so long as someone in the party kept nibbling at a kebab. I managed to last one round, as the pervasive stench of dripping mystery meat rotating on a spit made me feel vaguely ill, but Dieter was talking blue streaks everywhere, charming the girls at the table next to us, who said they could maybe get us a table at the Met Bar if we were willing to pay for the drinks. Knowing there was no way I could afford even seltzer water at the Met Bar, I made my excuses and left, queueing up for a night bus back to Chalk Farm.

The English, when drunk, amazed me with their gregarious ebullience. I knew we had a reputation for being quite repressed, but in that bus shelter, chatting with complete strangers, as three girls in gaudy minidresses totally inappropriate for the blustery Spring weather shouted Slur lyrics at the top of their lungs, I suddenly felt very young again, like I had finally been invited to one of my parents' parties as a grown-up. One of the girls handed round a can of Stella, and I drank, with total strangers. I clapped and shouted for more as they finished their rendition of _This Is The Modern Way_ and launched into _Primrose Hillbillies_ , remembering how much Merry had loved that album. When the bus finally came, I was almost disappointed, but they piled on after me. Climbing the stairs to the top of the bus, with my new best friends crushed into the seat next to me, I gazed out the window in drunken amazement as the bus rounded Marble Arch, at landmarks I remembered so distinctly from my own childhood.

"Oh my god, I love your accent, are you American, where are you from?" chirped the most mouthy of the Slur Girls, in a broad Newcastle burr, after hearing me stumbling over money with the conductor.

"New York," I explained hesitantly, then under provocation, revealed that I was, in point of fact, coming from my own record release party.

"Oh my god, you're in a band? Well cool! What are you called? What do you sound like? Where can we get your record?" After the totally blasé reaction of the assembled music industry of West London, the enthusiasm of the Slur girls was reassuring. Someone, at last, was impressed by my being in a band.

I explained all to them as the bus crawled along Oxford Street, wondering if I'd ever get used to the sensation of having fans. The girls burbled with excitement, promising to go the very next day and buy the album at Our Price, and had they not got off at Tottenham Court Road to run for another night bus to Stoke Newington, I swear they would have invited themselves back to our flat. Now wouldn't that have impressed Dieter, turning up with three boisterous 19 year old girls? But no, at that point, I still felt a vague loyalty to Merry, even if I had not seen or spoken to her in nearly a month.

The next morning, I got up early, clucking my tongue at Dieter's empty bed next to mine, then took a bus by myself up to Oxford Street, to the giant HMV at Oxford Circus. And there, yes, on the wall was a giant, blown-up black and red poster of the four of us. It was something that Dieter had designed, his unmistakable aesthetic, four red bars on a black background, looking a bit like an inverse of the old Black Flag logo, but a bit more 60s jazz album cover, because inside each bar was a black and red line sketch of one of us. Again, the drawings were Dieter's handiwork, bold but exquisite renderings that perfectly caught each of our personalities: Doyle louche and relaxed like a naughty schoolboy; Dick elegant and sophisticated, his hat pushed back at a rakish angle; Dieter, thin and angular and smoking furiously; and me, looking simultaneously both oddly haughty yet also wide-eyed with excitement.

Below the poster, was a whole rack of our album in both CDs and Vinyl. Barely trusting myself to touch one, I walked up to the rack and picked one up, turning it over in my hands to reassure myself of its solidity. Despite having listened to the final mixes a thousand times and having agonised over running order and having poured over the proofs of the album art, none of it had seemed real. But here it was. My CD. I had made this. My band had made it happen. For a moment, I considered picking one up and carrying it over to the register to buy it, but stopped myself. What if someone recognised me; that would be embarrassing. But in a way, it would be more embarrassing if they didn't. I decided not to risk it, either way.

But as I walked back towards the door, I heard familiar chords ring out over the shop's sound system, so familiar that for a moment, I almost thought I had written them myself. But no. It was not one of our tracks. And as I looked up towards the giant video screen at the back of the shop, I saw Merry's long blonde hair shimmer into view. It was like, at every important moment of my life, she was always there, even if it was some hyperreal representation of her that I carried around in my heart, instead of the real thing. _Shame, shame, such a shame_. I watched for a few minutes, then when the song faded and another took its place, quietly left, feeling something of myself still yearning towards her. When we got back to the States, I would find her, I would chase her down, I would ring Bebe to get Cindy's cell phone number, and I would find her. And then completely forgot about the plan, when I got back to Chalk Farm to find airplane tickets waiting for us.

We flew on to Germany next, and Jesus Christ, if I thought the English could drink, the Germans were mental. Dieter loved it, and dragged us all out to terrible clubs where they played relentless techno at tooth chattering volumes. It had been weird, how gigs in the UK were so much more fun, compared to the US, because kids in the UK, they fucking _cared_ about music in a way that Americans only really cared about sports. But Europe? That was another level up again, because European gigs, they fucking paid us, and well. And they didn't just pay us, they put us up in hotels and laid on beautiful food and treated us like royalty because apparently in Europe, alternative music was actually subsidised by arts funding from the government? In Berlin, the whole European Windlass office came out to see us, still calling me 'that efficient young man from New York' and then took us out clubbing afterwards, dancing until dawn. Berlin was amazing - and so fucking _cheap_ compared to New York and London - that after two days there, we never wanted to leave.

Then Gerry rang us and told us that he had a surprise for us, that we were not to come home just yet, we were going on to Poland to meet up with another Musketeer band. When we got there, we found that we had been signed on as support act for the whole European tour with... Mexican Summers. Doyle was practically beside himself with joy, watching Jorge with outright hero worship as the two slowly circled one another, before becoming fast friends on a booze-fuelled ferry ride across the Baltic to the Scandinavian leg of our tour.

The night was beautiful, the early summer glow lighting up the horizon so it never really got dark. Both bands gathered together on the bow deck of the ship, Doyle and Jorge with their guitars out, treating the other passengers to an impromptu concert as they blended their voices on traditional folk songs in Spanish.

As I half-lay on one side of a double deck chair, basking in the warm evening air, Jeanette, the legendary drummer of Mexican Summers, came stumbling over, a cigarette in one hand and a tumbler of devilish Polish vodka in the other. "This seat taken?" she asked.

"Nah, go ahead," I offered, scooting over, feeling more than slightly starstruck. Even in her mid 30s, Jeanette was still a very handsome woman, tiny, too slender to hit those drums as hard as she did, with a mountain of pitch-black hair cut by a jagged blonde streak. And even though she was known to be Jorge's lifelong partner, well, to be honest, that only increased her mythical aura. She offered me a cigarette, and for a moment, I was almost tempted, thinking that yeah, if I ever took up smoking, it would be because Jeanette Flores offered me a cigarette. But instead I shook my head demurely, and we fell to chatting about the tour and about music.

After the second tumbler of bisongrass vodka, I finally worked up the courage to ask her what was really on my mind. "So how do you manage it, you and Jorge?"

"How do we manage what?" Jeanette squinted against her own cigarette smoke, tossing her fringe out of her eyes.

"Balance being in a relationship, and being in a band." If there was hope for Jorge and Jeanette, maybe there was still hope for Merry and me, even though I could barely remember the last time I had seen her.

"Honey, Jorge and I ain't been in a _relationship_ relationship for, what, 6, 7 years now?" Drawing back slightly, she eyed me evenly, taking in my disappointment and my disbelief. "Sweet child, we do the band together, because it's what we _do_ , and yeah, we got two kids together, and we raise those kids together because it's easier than raising them alone, though not so much now they're old enough to go and stay with their grandparents. But that lovey-dovey shit? That don't survive this lifestyle, are you kidding?"

"Wow," I sighed, staring out into the distance, where the weird, flat tundra of Finland stretched endlessly into the horizon like a sodden green baize. Although I could feel the breeze in my hair and smell the salt water blown back off the bow, the boat barely seemed to be moving, compared with that endless empty expanse. "How do you... deal with that?"

Jeanette shrugged and lit another cigarette off the butt of the last. "How do you deal with anything?" She took a deep drag, then burst into her song, her silky voice filling up the space now that Doyle and Jorge had descended into squabbling over what song to play next. "Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think..."

Across the boat, Jorge's head pricked up, like he and Jeanette were still connected on some subatomic frequency, picking up his guitar again to strum a ska rhythm. "Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink!"

Doyle let out a yelp of joy, and started to fingerpick along, though it was soon obvious he was trying to play the Specials cover, and Jorge was doing the Prince Buster version. All along the deck, the two bands crowded together, singing along. "The years go by, as quickly as you wink, enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think."

"That's it, I'm turning in," announced Jeanette quietly, with a meaningful look in my direction.

"I'll go with you," I offered, not really thinking anything beyond some vestige of gentlemanly politeness. Honestly, I just wanted to crawl to bed myself, drunk and exhausted by the long hours of touring.

But outside her room, she paused and eyed me carefully, her hand on the half-open door. "Are you coming in, then?"

"I'm sorry?" I stuttered, completely misreading the situation.

And abruptly, Jeanette leaned forward and kissed me, full on the lips. Her mouth tasted of cigarettes and bisongrass and late nights on endless world tours, and really, I was too stunned to respond. She pulled away, laughing at the joyful surprise on my face. "You're so cute, sweet child. And you're the best kind of cute - the kind of cute that doesn't even know how cute he is." She walked through into her cabin, leaving the door ajar, so it was my choice whether I joined her or left. "Pour me another drink if you're coming."

For a moment, I wavered on the doorstep. Jeanette fucking Flores. I had grown up with her voice, grown up with her band's photos on my wall. Had I ever thought about it? Of course I had thought about it, before I'd know that she and Jorge were a couple, what teenage boy from the 80s hadn't, with her sultry lips and her smokey, mascara-stained rock chick eyes? And suddenly, I understood what it was that all those girls who threw themselves at Doyle and Dieter were really about. It wasn't even the idea of sleeping with Jeanette, though I was already getting hard just at the thought of that possibility, it was the idea of literally becoming one with that music that I loved so much. And this might, well, be my one and only chance to experience what that was _like_ from this side of fandom. My last chance to know what it was like to be a groupie, instead of the group. I'd even joked with Merry that Jeanette was my Graham Cooper, the person I wanted a get-out clause for, and here it was, my actual opportunity. Taking a deep breath, I stepped through the cabin door.

As I poured her a drink, she kicked off her cowboy boots and climbed onto the narrow cabin bed. She lit a cigarette, still staring at me, and accepted the vodka as I looked around for a place to sit. The cabin was pretty bare bones, a single stool covered in her drumstick pouch and tuning keys, but I didn't feel quite confident enough to sit on the bed beside her. "So this is the glamourous rock'n'roll lifestyle," I quipped nervously. "Do you have any music?"

She pointed at the tiny cassette player on the dressing table, and I went over to try to find something to play. Oh my god, there were actual unreleased Mexican Summers demos all over the table, and I felt my knees shaking with fanboy joy. But no, if I was actually going to... well, _you know_ , with Jeanette, there was no way she'd want to hear her own music. Or would she? I found it awkward as fuck, but Merry found it kind of a turn-on. But finally I found an early Dead Letters compilation, or at least what looked like one. There were song titles I didn't recognise amidst familiar favourites and weird B-sides, and the handwriting was awfully familiar. When I turned it over to flip the tape out, I saw the note scrawled on the inside liner.

'hey jeanie, here's the new stuff we've been working on. let me know what you think should make the final album cut - mattie'

My hands were quivering as I turned back to the bed to ask, with hushed reverence, if she had really had a hand in choosing the album cuts and B-sides that had comprised that first, seminal Dead Letters album that the metal boys had scratched up so badly in the Collegiate student lounge. But Jeanette was already asleep, her head back, her eyes closed, her mouth falling open as she gently snored, looking at the same time, both a thousand years old and the same skinny teenage girl with the dashing blonde streak through her coal-black hair, on the inside cover of the first Mexican Summers EP.

For a terrible moment, I considered stealing the tape. Christ, it had to be worth a bomb, but that wasn't even why I wanted it. I wanted to touch musical history, to carry around a piece of Dead Letters' and Mexican Summers' heritage, steal a piece of their mystique the way that girls thought they could capture some essence of Dieter's coolness by sucking his cock. But then I stopped myself, and put the tape back into the case, and stowed it back where I had found it. It was Jeanette's history with Matthew from Dead Letters, not mine.

If I were another man - If I were Dieter, or even Doyle - I might have woken her up, might have insisted on redeeming the offer implicit in that kiss. But as I stared down at her sleeping form, I both wanted it, and didn't want it. But it wasn't actually her body that I wanted, as attractive as I still very much found her. It was like her physical presence, this tiny, bird-boned woman, was just the symbol, just the signifier. And what she - what Mexican Summers - signified to me... teenage memories, those first, electric experiences of falling in love with music, memories of significant events in my life that had taken place to those tunes. How could any physical experience live up to the weight of those expectations? It was better to leave those dreams intact, and leave my erection un-acted upon.

With a deep sigh, I walked back towards the bed, took the tumbler of vodka out of her hand so she didn't spill it, and placed it in the drinks holder by the bedside table. I stubbed out the cigarette still smouldering in the ashtray, and emptied the whole thing into the metal bin in the bathroom. Then I found a blanket, spread it across her body, and bent down to gently kiss those legendary blonde-streaked bangs. It was like kissing rock'n'roll itself. And then I left, back to my own, cold, empty bunk.

 

She dropped her tray opposite mine at breakfast the next morning. "Woo, well I got a bit too drunk last night. But you're a real gentleman, Danny Asheton. A rare breed," she told me with an edge of gratitude to her voice, as she sat down.

"Did you sleep well?" I enquired, still feeling slightly starstruck, though, really, I never wanted to get to the point where it felt normal, having breakfast so casually with members of my childhood favourite bands.

"Like the proverbial log!" she snorted. "A log going over Niagara Falls in heavy weather, thanks to this fucking boat, but, hey. You learn to survive touring, or you sink. And I, Danny Asheton, am gonna teach you how to survive touring. And if someone else is paying for your breakfast, you fucking eat more than just one slice of fucking toast."

And so Jeanette Flores took me under her wing. And though that weird midnight kiss was never repeated, and the offer never extended again, I learned more about surviving tours from Jeanette than I had learned from a lifetime of reading Hammer of the Gods and watching old bootlegs of Cocksucker Blues. 

Jeanette taught me about per diems, the daily allowance of money dribbled out from the tour manager, and how to stretch them. She taught me to steal fruit from hotel rooms and displays and eat it religiously to stave off the endless colds and incipient scurvy. She taught me to get a really good pair of closed-backed headphones and clamp them over my ears, with ambient music playing, if you wanted to be able to sleep through absolutely anything, even a drum soundcheck. She taught me how to shower in a dressing room sink and how a dash of talcum powder on your hairbrush made your hairdo do for another day when you really couldn't wash. She taught me about Febreeze and how spritzing your stage clothes and leaving them out while you showered was nearly as good as a dry cleaning, not that Jorge ever bothered with anything like that, but jeez, a girl had to have standards on the road or everything would go to hell.

"You must think we're really shallow," I apologised as she sat in a cramped dressing room in London, watching us change from the street clothes we wore in the dirty van to our stage suits. Jeanette didn't have stage clothes; she always dressed in exactly the same rock'n'roll dirtbag style, black jeans and black band t-shirt and black leather jacket, every minute of every day. "Putting on stage clothes for every gig, even for a weeknight show at the Camden Falcon." In the weeks since we'd last been in London, we had actually outgrown the Barfly, as sales of our album picked up with radio play, but we'd decided to honour the booking anyway, just because.

"No way, man," shrugged Jeanette, stuffing stolen lemons from the bar into her backpack. "I remember when we used to wear stage clothes. But then we reached a point where we forgot to ever taken 'em off. Ha!"

"But Mexican Summers and Dead Letters and all those cool Minneapolis bands, they always struck me as so... _anti_ -image," I said as tried yet again to iron the curls out of my hair. The British humidity was killing me. "That's why Doyle loved them so much."

"Anti-Image?" Jeanette hooted with laughter. "Dead Letters? Oh, sweet child."

"I can't imagine Dead Letters ever going onstage wearing anything but plaid flannel shirts and faded Levi's 501s. That's what I always related to, about them. Just totally honest. No bullshit. Authentic," said Doyle.

"Let me tell you about Matthew from Dead Letters!" Jeannette cackled, throwing her head back. "I have known him since we were kids; we went to high school together. There is not a thread of his clothes, or a line of his stage banter that is not thought out and carefully scripted and rehearsed a hundred times before they go on tour. When they're playing stadiums that big, they can't afford to have a single bit of banter fall flat or go wrong. Same thing, every night, for three months of the tour, it get bullshit real fast."

"But his clothes. They don't scream image, they just say, y'know, archetypical midwestern American guy. Like he just grew up out of the dirt. Jeans and flannels,  that's just what people wear, out in the midwest," Doyle insisted, staring at her as if she were telling him there was no santa claus. "He's every man."

"He's so _Everyman_ he gives me the hives, to be honest," Dieter sniped. "Spare me from _Everyman_."

"Matthew? Everyman? Let me tell you about those clothes, hon. His faded Levi's? He's got a team of assistants, just about the same size as him, same body shape, that he pays to break in and wear out his Levi's for him. Buys em store brand new by the half dozen, then pays someone else to break 'em in for him. And the flannel shirts? He has a stylist go out with a fuckin' Pantone chart to second hand shops, and match the colours of his flannels so that they go with the tone palette of the latest album cover and stage set. That guy owns nearly 200 pairs of Timbaland boots, to make sure that he strikes just the right amount of butch for each gig. The man never wears the same outfit twice, not even during each half of the show. Have you noticed that? He used to give his old flannels to us, I got bags of them. I'd cut 'em up and resize them for the kids."

"You should have sold them, to be honest," I observed, thinking how much I would have paid at one point for one of Matthew from Dead Letters' flannel shirts. "People would pay a lot of money for those."

"Don't I know it," snorted Jeanette, bumming a cigarette off Doyle. "Still wouldn't be enough to cover the back royalties they owe us from ripping us off. But they're playing stadiums and we're still playing... where are we playing tomorrow, honey? What are they calling the Town and Country Club these days? Jesus Christ, I been playing these damn venues too long. They're still the same old stinkpits, but they just change the name every few years, to make you feel like you're moving up in the world."

I excused myself, and went back out to the bar to check on the growing queue outside. Playing with Mexican Summers, it was easy to convince myself that the audience were not there to see us, which made me a lot less nervous. But the crowd outside the Barfly, that scared me a little. It was the first clue that something was actually happening with Metropolis, something that might prove to be bigger than the back room of a Camden pub. There were hundreds of people outside the Barfly, lined up around the block, almost all the way back to the railway bridge. Loads of them were wearing those distinctive red and black Metropolis T-shirts, and even weirder still, some of them were actually wearing suits, or kind of semi-military get-ups in imitation of Dieter. For fucks sake, there was even a tall, lanky teenager with an asymmetrical haircut and an ankle-length German World War I great coat, smoking in that distinctive way that Dieter did, cigarette jutting out from his thumb and forefinger. In a weird way, he looked more like _Dieter_ than Dieter did.

Taking a deep breath, I stuck my head outside and wondered if I dared make a run across the road to a cornershop for some breath mints, or something to chew to keep me from grinding my teeth with nerves. Half of me wanted to go out and say hello, say thank you, say oh my god, you are actual fans. The other half of me was terrified. But across the street, I could see someone waving, trying to get my attention. Oh my god, it was the Slur girls from the night bus! Slipping out of the door under the bouncer's arm, I trotted over to say hello. The two dark-haired girls were both wearing Metropolis T-shirts, but the mouthy ginger Geordie, she had stuffed her plump frame into a mod suit, though to be fair, with her round, smiling face, and her halo of ginger hair, she looked fucking _ace_ in it. Admiring the Metropolis badges - and wow, she actually had a Deltawave badge, too - on her lapel, I felt my heart swell with pride, thinking to myself, yeah, these kids are _obsessive_. They do their fucking research. Fuck the cool kids and the fashion kids changing their allegiances every week; these are the kind of people I want for fans.

"The Slur girls," I laughed. "You must have found your way back to Stoke Newington, then."

"I can't believe you remember us!" The ginger one looked proud.

"I can't believe you remembered me," I laughed, feeling myself blush slightly.

"Oh my lord, we bought your album, we taped your Peel Show, we read the NME, we chased down a copy of both your singles... Well, the British reprint of Impediment, at least." The smaller dark-haired one's voice tumbled out all in a rush, while the taller one just stared at me. Really, it was a bit overwhelming, being on the receiving end of all that love. 

"Can we take a picture?" the ginger one asked, producing a polaroid. I posed proudly with each of them, then stood awkwardly as they flapped the photos around, waiting for them to develop. "Are you coming to the show?" I stuttered stupidly, appreciative of their display of devotion, but not sure what to do with it.

"That's the problem. We can't get into your show," moaned the small dark one. "It's been sold out for weeks."

I blinked, wondering what I could do for them, if I could smuggle them in, or claim that one of them was my sister... then I remembered the improbably long guest list that Roger had tried to strong-arm all of his journalist mates onto. "What are your names?"

"I'm Sandra," burbled the ginger Geordie. "And those two are Becky and Becca."

"Sandra, Becky and Becca," I repeated to make sure I'd heard right. "Right, don't worry. The three of you will be on the guest list."

Two hours later, I knew it was the best decision of the tour so far. Those music journalist fucker friends of Roger's, they just stood around the back of the venue, staring at us, arms crossed over their chests, like, yeah, impress us. But Sandra, and Becky and Becca, and the tall kid in the German great coat, they went down the front, and they _danced_. I can't even tell you, what a trip it was, looking down into the audience, and just seeing those kids, just totally losing themselves to the music, singing along with every fucking word, tossing themselves about as they stared up at us with open devotion. Fuck those music journalist types; these were the people that I made music for. I danced even harder myself, I threw myself at the music, I played my guitar like it was a streak of electricity, and I looked down at them enjoying themselves, singing up at me, and shouted the words right back at them.

Becca caught me as I came out off the stage, completely surprising me with a wet kiss, all across my cheek, making me blush redder than I'd blushed in years. Becky appeared with a round of cheap, nasty Red Stripe - oh cheers - as Sandra started to talk my ear off about how amazing we'd been. She'd managed to get the set list, so she was going to go and tell our internet fan club how fucking brilliant the gig had been, and how nice the band (well, me) had been to them.

"Wait, wait," I said, trying to get a word in edgewise. "We don't have a fan club. We've never set one up."

Sandra and Becca exchanged knowing glances. "Yeah, you do. Well... you do, now." Blushing, the trio confessed: Sandra had got an internet account and a huge amount of server space at the North London Polytechnic where she studied computer science. The three of them, noticing our total lack of an internet presence, had not just built a fan website, but started a mailing list for fans to chat to one another, and had been in regular conversation with fans from as far afield as Canada, Poland, and even Japan.

I stared at them in blank incomprehension, just trying to get my head around it.

Misreading my silence, Sandra and the two Becs exchanged worried glances. "You're not mad at us, are you?"

"Mad at you?" I stuttered, hardly believing that three teenage girls would put in that amount of work for some random guitarist they met on a night bus. "I feel like we should put you on the payroll! Seriously, how can we ever thank you? Can I give you T-shirts? Merch? Signed copies of the album? Guest list for the show tomorrow?"

"We've all already got the album - and we've got tickets for tomorrow, thank you," Becky said, even while Becca elbowed her. "Though we wouldn't mind aftershow passes..."

"Done," I agreed, relieved to get off so lightly.

"What we really want, though," Sandra cut in, her eyes flashing. "Is a copy of the Impediment E.P."

I burst out laughing. It was the kind of outrageous request I'd have made when I was 19, buttonholing a musician backstage at Brownie's. "That's a pretty serious request. I'm not even sure I have a copy of it any more." That was a lie; actually I had three, one to play and one to keep pristine for posterity, plus the white label test pressing.

"I suppose I could always ask Charlie at Three Square," Sandra sighed. "I need to get in contact with him to see if I can get Impediment era promo shots for the website, anyway."

"You are really thorough," I whistled in appreciation. "You know what? Give me your postal address, and I will dig out the white label and send it to you when I get back to New York."

It was totally worth it, I reflected, just to see the expression on her face. The joy, the wonder, the sheer untrammelled pleasure of the first flush of fandom. Or maybe I just wanted to prove Jeanette wrong, prove that there was something pure, and authentic, and untouchable about the rapport between an artist and their audience, between music and a fan. She could not spoil my love of Dead Letters by telling me stories about Matthew, and I was going to do everything in my power to inspire and deserve that kind of devotion in any fans that Metropolis were lucky enough to acquire.


	20. Putting On The Reich

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Metropolis' relentless climb to fame accelerates, Dieter discovers a new favourite game: baiting the British music press. But the rest of the band are not so pleased when they discover the press can bite back.
> 
> Daniel, however, despite the newfound confidence of musical success, popular acclaim, and a stylish new suit, is still having trouble with women.

Support was building in England and France fastest, so after the Mexican Summers tour was finished, we went back and did a larger, headlining tour of those two countries. We were now making enough money to spring for hotels out of our guarantees, so my poor cousin got her flat in Chalk Farm back. We sprung for a bouquet of red roses, got her a nice card signed by all of us, and hastily organised a rug shampoo for the nasty-looking stain that Dieter had claimed was just candle wax - honestly, I did not want to know.

For this tour, we acquired a publicist in London, an excitable young woman whose only job was to try to persuade members of the UK press to write about us, interview us, review our album or attend our shows. I knew such people existed, I had even dealt with a few of them while doing A&R for Deltawave. Honestly, I thought Americans had invented the idea of spin, but the British were absolutely mad for Public Relations, and everyone and their dog seemed to have a publicist. But, apparently, with no less than two weekly music papers, a dozen monthly music magazines and a whole network of local entertainment press and college newspapers, it was a full time job keeping track of them all. And so Emma took on the job of organising press coverage on our behalf.

Emma told us that the NME was considering putting us on the cover, but they wanted a picture highlighting Dieter. Remembering the fuss that Elisha pitched over Select wanting to put Merry on the cover, I told her that I didn't care if they wanted a picture of Dick dressed up as Santa Claus, so long as we got that front cover. So we did another shoot in a warehouse in Dalston, with Dieter front and centre, pretending to be the leader, and the NME loved it. Everyone in Europe fucking loved Dieter, his outrageous clothes, his outrageous views, his habit of shooting his silver-toothed mouth off to anyone who would listen. And everyone in Europe wanted to know... was Dieter actually a nazi or wasn't he, until I got sick of answering interview questions about Dieter's problematic dress sense and shouted "It's a German World War I uniform. And he's half fucking Jewish. If you want to know why a half Jewish kid wears a German fucking World War I uniform onstage, ask him your fucking self!" down the phone, then passed it across the hotel room I was sharing with Dieter.

"Do you know how tired I am of being asked questions about your fucking haircut?" I muttered to thin air, as Dieter took the phone and put on his best interview face. "All anyone ever wants to talk about is your damn clothes. No one ever asks me about the record, no one ever wants to know about the music. I spent two years, honing the guitar tone on _Snow Day In New York_ , trying to get the spring reverb just right on the Fender Twin. No one _ever_ asks about my spring reverb. They just wanna know if your haircut means you're a fucking Nazi!"

But Dieter smirked at me, holding his hand over the mouthpiece as he sat up in his bed. All he had to say to me was "You know, you really are starting to sound like Elisha Diamond," and that shut me up again, throwing myself down into my own bed, wondering why I had to share a hotel room with insufferable Dieter, while Doyle got the affable and easy-going Dick.

Dieter kinked the phone cord with his long, elegant fingers, and twisted his thin lips into a sinister smile, as he explained to the incredulous journalist how his mother, a beautiful German Jew who had been talent-scouted as a fashion model after working as a seamstress in New York City's garment district, had been seduced and then abandoned by an Argentinean polo player. An Argentinean polo player who was the son of some rather _interesting_ parents who just arrived one day, without papers, from Germany, in 1945. The journalist at the other end was eating it up, clearly putty in Dieter's hands, but I stared at him when he finally put the phone down. "What?" said Dieter. "They did ask."

"I've met your father. He's a car salesman in New Jersey," I accused.

Dieter stared me down quite calmly. "Harvey Finkel is my _adopted_ father. We have no blood between us."

I was completely taken aback. How had I managed to be in a band with Dieter for four years, and never known this? Unless it was another lie. It was hard to tell with Dieter, where public image ended and the real Dieter began. I tried another tack. "And your mother is an attractive woman, very attractive, in fact, for a working class housewife, but... a model? Really?"

"She was, you know. I'll show you photos when we get back to New York. Your sister had heard of her."

I winced at the thought of Dieter having any kind of conversations with my sister, so I changed the topic. "I don't know, Dieter. You don't think it's... emotionally dishonest to use your family background like that, for titillation, in interviews?" It was just way over the line of anything I'd have ever told anyone about my family, let alone a stranger, and especially a stranger from the press, who was likely to publish that information and broadcast it around the world.

"Emotionally dishonest?" Dieter shook his head briefly, then raised an immaculate eyebrow, looking almost amused. "This is show business, Daniel."

"You don't think it's at all... manipulative," I clarified, crossing my arms across my chest defensively.

Dieter actually burst out laughing, his whole body doubling over with mirth as he clapped his hands. "Manipulative? _You_ , Daniel Asheton, are accusing _me_ of being manipulative?"

"What are you saying? I'm not manipulative," I protested, glaring at him across the bed.

Holding up one hand, Dieter raised an imaginary telephone to his ear. "Hello, pot! This is kettle! You're looking black today!"

"Fuck off," I sputtered, kicking at the covers of my bedspread. "I'm not manipulative. I just have... good people skills..."

Dieter was laughing so hard, and laughing in such a deliberately exaggerated way, pounding his mattress like a cartoon character, that I suddenly started to wonder if his mirth - and indeed his earlier garrulousness with the press - was chemically enhanced. I mean, sure, there was often coke going round at our aftershows these days, and I couldn't fault him for indulging occasionally, but this was the middle of the afternoon.

"Knock it off," I snapped, and retreated to the bathroom. When I emerged, Dieter had stopped laughing, almost as if a switch had been thrown, as if his emotions ceased to exist when he had no audience. Ignoring him, I threw myself back down on the bed, and picked up a copy of the NME, to read the review of our Barfly gig for about the twentieth time. _Well-dressed NYC quartet deliver incandescent London debut, mixing incendiary guitar atmospherics with opaque, intellectual lyrics._ Incendiary guitar. That was good, right?

Dieter, of course, could not stand being ignored. "Oh come on, Asheton," he drawled, propping himself up on one elbow, leaning across to my bed to pull down the corner of my magazine like an impatient kitten. "It was only Melody Maker. How is playing with the press, winding up the occasional journalist, really any different from the way we used to wind up the political correctness warriors back at art school?"

"The stakes are somewhat higher here, than at art school, Dieter," I warned him. "People actually pay attention to music magazines over here; it affects our sales."

"The stakes, the stakes," Dieter parroted, affecting a slightly mincing English accent. "Oh no, Dieter, we can't do that, it might affect my 4.0! Oh no, Dieter, don't say that, it might affect our sales! Did it ever occur to you, that the concepts and actions I put in your little head are the reason that you had a 4.0 at university, and the reason this band has any sales?"

Fixing him with the 'Asheton Death Glare' for a moment, I shook my head then raised the wall of my music paper again. "Save it, Finkel," I muttered. "Before you actually turn out to believe your own press."

As it turned out, Dieter genuinely loved doing interviews, especially if the cameras were on him. He had a particular expression of haughty disdain that he reserved for members of the music press, as if he thought they were completely beneath his contempt, but that didn't stop him from dominating any conversations with them. And the music press seemed to have a complete fascination with him, as if vying for his attention, even while pretending to loathe him. Much like girls had done, back at the Lacuna Lounge. Although Emma arranged interviews for all four of us, it was invariably Dieter that the press wanted to talk to.

"So, Dieter. What do you say to accusations that you, your band, and your music are utterly pretentious?" one obnoxious British journalist with a Northern accent lead with, straight out of the gate. He was the same critic who had accused us of being Dead Letters copyists in our very first NME review, in fact he'd turned up at our Leeds gig, stood in the front row and showered the stage with empty envelopes marked 'Dead Letters Office'. Which was you know, fair point, after all, some of us had been massive Dead Letters fans, but then again, that was hardly _all_ there was to our music, and the comparisons were starting to be a bit irritating, rather than flattering.

"Pretentious, moi?" asked Dieter, covering his mouth with his hand in mock surprise. "Do you even know the meaning of that word..."

"Attempting to impress, by affecting..." the journalist supplied, reading something off his sheet of interview questions as if reading from the dictionary.

" _Affecting_ ," Dieter cut him off. "Pretence. Pretending. I know where the word comes from. And I have to tell you it would be a pretence, if I were to _pretend_ not to be intelligent, not to be well-educated, and cultured, and interested in art and aesthetics and _style_ , and I am sorry to inform you, but I am the least pretentious person you will ever meet, because everything that I represent myself as being, I am."

"So you're saying that you are _authentically_ pretentious?"

"Authentic?" Dieter pronounced the word as if it were a bit of gristle stuck between his teeth. "I am not interested in authenticity. Authenticity is a myth, it is a pose, it is a carefully constructed representation of an imagined way of being, as counter-factual as any deliberate aesthetic or intellectual posture. I mean, have you even read any Baudrillard? The whole world is nothing but simulacra now."

Doyle and I exchanged glances and raised eyebrows as Dieter became steadily more indignant. Doyle sometimes joked that he wanted to start a Dieter Drinking Game for every time he brought up Baudrillard or Adorno or Lacan in an interview. But I actually secretly loved it when Dieter went off on one of his _philosophical_ tears; it made for great press. And across the room, I could see Emma smirking and practically rubbing her hands together as the fur flew.

"Objectivity is just another word for straight white male subjectivity," Dieter was asserting now. "Delusions of authenticity are the last refuge of a person with no imagination. What could be more boring, than to be constrained by such a pedant's notions of The Real? I prefer the free interplay of... fabulous... autotelic... fabulousity!"

The rest of us had to fight very hard to keep straight faces and not collapse in laughter, but it was one of the things that we agreed long ago. We would present a unified outward appearance in front of the press at all times. Even when "METROPOLIS: FABULOUS AUTOTELIC FABULOSITY!" appeared emblazoned across our photo on the cover of the NME.

But this interviewer did not give up easily, even as Dieter lit his post-argument cigarette and sucked at it, in that weird way he held it hooked between thumb and forefinger that he'd learned off looking at photos of Joy Division. "Well, what does your work signify anyway? It's all flash and surface, but no depth. Some songs are profound because they're like locked safes that have to be interrogated to reveal their secrets. But your work doesn't come off like that, it just sits there, like a shiny lump of solid metal with no interior, and no depth."

Dieter's eyes flashed as he took another drag then tapped his cigarette against the ashtray. "Are you familiar with the work of Donald Judd? With Anish Kapoor? Modern artists who create works which are, to your parochial little mind, the literal equivalent of shiny metal boxes. In some cases, the impenetrability of the shiny metal box is the art, the sheer unknowable enigma of it, the way the mind fails to do anything except slide off it, just marvelling at the immense shiny _boxhood_ of the art." He paused for another drag of his cigarette before continuing.

"And in other cases, it's the environment that you place that shiny metal box in which creates its meaning, its resonance, its emotional weight. A shiny metal box in a gallery means a different thing to a shiny metal box placed out in the middle of the Marfa desert. Our music is the sonic equivalent of a Donald Judd sculpture. What you bring to it, when you peer into it, and see your own face reflected and projected back at you. So if our songs _are_ just... shiny metal boxes, and you look into them, and see absolutely nothing... well, that's hardly our fault is it?" He smiled, peeling back his lips so that the light reflected off his shiny metal teeth, looking so much like a work of art himself that surely the journalist couldn't fail to be impressed?

"So you're willing to admit that your work is completely empty, devoid of any meaning except that which its listeners project into it themselves?" the journalist crowed triumphantly.

Dieter stared back for a moment, furious at how his words had been twisted and bent back into a trap, but Doyle, uncharacteristically both gracious and candid, stepped into the gap. "Yes, actually I think that's a perfectly fair assessment. I am well aware, that I am a... a cipher. Obviously, my lyrics mean something to me. But when I put them into a song, they become perfect blanks. People take away from them only ever what they bring to them. I exist only as a silver screen for people's projections. That is both my greatest strength, as a lyricist, but also my greatest failing as a human being."

The journalist stepped up for another round as Dieter regrouped with a counter attack, but I turned and stared at Doyle, realising in that moment that Doyle had actually said something incredibly profound, showing precocious insight into his own condition, and yet oddly saddening.

Despite the lopsided press attention (and hadn't Bebe always said that Dieter was the one who had star quality?) Dieter and I were actually getting along, for the most part. Dieter was in a good mood, we were making _plans_ together. Scheming. Dieter loved scheming, and so did I. We schemed about promotional artwork and stunts. We schemed about photo shoots. I loved photo shoots, loved the glamour and theatricality and playing with a dress-up box and everything I'd ever dreamed of when I was a small, desperately lonely teenager with a funny accent that no one really bothered getting to know. Dieter and I came up with themes for our photo shoots, imaginary films that we wanted to pretend we were soundtracking with the various songs. Then we would go off to the shoot, and be fussed over, styled, made up, get our clothes pinned onto us to fit better, showing off our lithe bodies (I hated the way I always lost weight on tour, because who ever had the time to go to the gym, but European clothes were always cut to a slimmer bias anyway).

In Europe - in the UK a bit, but much moreso in France and Italy - journalists actually responded to our _Style_. Back in the States, people, well, people outside of the tiny bubble of New York, had been slightly suspicious of the clothes, the suits, the image. "The triumph of style over substance" as some local music guide in Boston had described the Impediment EP, and yeah, that dismissal still hurt. But in Europe, they loved it, they hailed us as 'the well-dressed New York quartet" or whatever, and the papers really did want to know whose shirts we wore, or at least, they did in Paris and Rome. Vogue L'Uomo even asked us to model for them - that was a head trip, to say the least! - to experience a tiny taste of what my ex-girlfriend had once gone through.

It had been Merry, after all, who had taught me how to pose for the camera, taking pictures of me with a polaroid in our apartment to show me how it worked. She'd learned it while modelling for Firbank, she'd said, but it totally worked for rock stars, too. Throw your shoulders back and push your head forward, dipping your chin, then smile like the person you want to fuck most in the world is on the other side of the camera. I always thought of Merry when we did photo shoots, I couldn't help myself. Though I didn't really think of fucking her, I thought of channelling that poise, that slightly naughty yet oddly innocent smile, the way she always managed to project _class_ , even when she was wearing nothing but a Firbank bikini. Dieter posed like he was born to it, all hips and cheekbones and that provocative asymmetrical hairdo, and Dick always oozed class in front of the camera, looking like the star of a 1930s gangster film, but Doyle hated being photographed, and sulked if they put him in the front. And what was the point of having a good-looking frontman like Doyle if he wouldn't... _front_?

Doyle was a moody bugger at the best of times, but touring seemed to bring out the worst in him. Dieter and Dick and I made the most of travel, asking local press to take us to art museums and the best cafes for people watching, but Doyle rarely came on those expeditions. In Italy, Dieter, Dick and I all pestered our contact at L'Uomo, until we were taken to a small but busy tailor on the outskirts of Naples, who measured us with the efficiency of an expert. It was a strange feeling, I reflected, standing in front of that harsh, unforgiving mirror, with an older man in a dress suit on his knees in front of me, scuttling round me with a tape measure. But that feeling... it was _power_ , I realised.

"Scusi, but Signore maybe wearing the wrong collar size," the tailor observed, when he was done measuring me up and down.

"Pardon?" I asked, confused, feeling for my tie, wondering if it had come loose.

"Collar should not flop around like this," the tailor explained, grabbing the collar and moving it about, back and forth. I was a small man, with a thin neck, and store-bought shirts always seemed to flop on me. "Collar should fit like this." Grabbing a hunk of the fabric at the back of my neck, the tailor folded it back with the skill of an expert and pulled it tight, moving me politely but firmly around to look in the mirror. "Should lie flat against throat, and not move when you shrug."

I observed the change in the mirror, noting that the snugger fit made me look about five years older and much more muscular. "That does look better."

"Wait here," the man directed, after wrapping the tape measure briefly around my neck. When he returned, he was bearing a beautiful, perfectly crisp-starched brilliant-white dress shirt. "Try this."

Trying on the shirt, feeling the high quality cotton against my skin, I resolved to never wear anything but tailored shirts, ever again. The shirt fitted so much better, made my skinny chest seem slender and streamlined instead of just bony. "Can I get a couple of these in my order, as well? A white one, a black one, and maybe a pinstripe one?"

The tailor nodded and smiled paternally. "Signore understands."

And when the newly fitted suits arrived, delivered on the back of a scooter by a perfectly dressed young man, the sense of power that I felt when I put mine on... It was like donning a suit of armour designed to make my shoulders look wider and my chest look broader, accentuating rather than hiding the slenderness of my short legs to make them appear longer. This, truly, was the country of Machiavelli. I looked like a prince. Together, Dick and Dieter and I, in our smartly tailored silk, we no longer looked like a bunch of poseurs from the Lower East Side; we looked like a _band_.

Well, except Doyle hadn't bought a suit; he had gone to the Lido instead and swum strokes then basked in the sun. But he just had those kind of preppy good looks that all he had to do was put on a shirt and tie and stand next between us three, and he just looked like he belonged. I always felt I wore my own sense of alienness like a turtle shell, but Doyle was just a chameleon, he took on the aspect of whoever he was around. In Europe, he was European; in America he was a WASP. I noticed how Doyle's accent changed with whoever was interviewing us, Castilian Spanish or Parisian French or home counties British, even while I struggled with my own mid-Atlantic drift.

But Europe could not seem to get enough of us, especially Britain, and more specifically, the British Music Press. Our publicist was certainly earning her paycheque. Select Magazine gave us the cover, and in addition to the glowing article, did a whole two-page spread on _The Gospel According To Metropolis: an Inside Guide to the World's Most Literate Band_. Here, they went through the album track by track, sometimes even line by line, breaking down the literary allusions and musical lifts that peppered the album. I was so pleased with it, I read select bits of it aloud, backstage at our showcase gig at Dingwalls.

- _Snow Day In New York_ \- The whispered line "snow is falling... listen!" at the beginning of the song is a sly lyrical reference to the Yoko Ono track of a similar name, though the heavy echo effect on Daniel J. Asheton Jr's guitar seems to recall the Galaxie 500 cover version. Many have noted singer Doyle Saunders' vocals on this album are heavily indebted to Matthew from Dead Letters, and Dead Letters have repaid the compliment by covering the song live at their last show at Madison Square Garden.

- _Rated Frustrated_ \- Metropolis' infamous second single, a song so blatantly about sex (or, rather, masturbation, due to the verse "When she won't ride my pony, I gotta ride my pony myself, my friend, I gotta whip my pony into shape, I gotta whip my pony back and forth, oh oh!") that after its debut on the Peel Show, the BBC reportedly received complaints about the salaciousness of Saunders' yelps during the choruses. The coded lines about the "Kinsey Response" are a pun on the Kinsey Reports, two books entitled "Sexual Behaviour In The Human Male" (and Female). The stark black and white video, filmed on location in Nottingham, was intended as a tribute to the British New Wave, or "kitchen sink dramas" of the 60s, especially _Saturday Night and Sunday Morning_ and _Billy Liar_.

- _Beyond The Zero_ \- is also the title of the first section of Thomas Pynchon's epic novel, _Gravity's Rainbow_. The "Slothrop" that appears in the first and third verse is a principle character in the novel. Both Saunders and bassist Dieter have namechecked Pynchon as a massive influence on the group. Drummer Dick Sticciano has stated that he intended the bass-heavy tribal drums on the track as a homage to The Curse's notorious darkest album, _Prostitution_ , while the octave-hopping disco basslines strongly recall Northampton's none more Gothic princes of darkness, Bauhaus.

- _P.U.A._ \- On older demos, this song is called Pick-Up Artist, that Saunders claims is about an ageing lothario. On the second verse, Saunders describes making love with the "you" of this song as "a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again" which is the title of a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace. The snatches of French dialogue during the introduction are from _And God Created Woman_ , a classic Nouvelle Vague film directed by Roger Vadim. Many have noted the similarity between the guitar riff on the chorus, and the main hook to The Smiths' _This Charming Man_ right down to Asheton's use of the Fender Twin guitar amp, as used by Johnny Marr of The Smiths, though the shuffling glam rock drumbeat is lifted straight off The Sweet's _Ballroom Blitz_.

- _Sailor To The Sea_ \- Everyone and their dog knows that this track features haunting backing vocals from a pre-fame Merry Wythenshawe of Deltawave, but what is less known about this track is that the lyric "all I ask is a tall, tall ship, and a star to steer her by" is a reference to the poem Sea Fever by John Masefield. Many listeners have compared the use of 12-string guitar and snare rolls on this track to the work of Liverpool post-punk, Echo and the Bunnymen, especially the album Ocean Rain.

- _Into The Arms Of Heaven_ \- just before Asheton's final blistering guitar solo, Saunders sings "All of us have a place in history. Mine is... clouds." Although this may sound like abject acid-addled nonsense, it is actually a quote from doomed poet Richard Brautigan, whom Saunders has name-dropped as a significant influence. As for the guitar, many have noticed the similarities between the frenetic one-note solo and the song Suicide, by 80s drone-rockers Spacemen 3. The title of that track is, itself, a reference to uber-cool one-note synth pioneers, Suicide. Now _that_ is meta-textual.

 

"That's actually pretty good," Doyle whistled. "I am seriously surprised that they caught some of those. I mean, that Brautigan one, that was quite obscure."

"If they compare us to Dead fucking Letters, one more time, I swear to god, I'm gonna..." Dieter let the end of the threat drop as he lit a cigarette with a brutal jerk of his zippo lighter.

"They mentioned my guitar tone!" I gushed, pounding the magazine page in excitement. "This is the first article about us that has ever mentioned exactly how much work I did, to get the spring reverb on _Snow Day_ exactly like Dean Wareham's guitar tone!"

But that Dingwalls show was our biggest headlining gig so far, and felt like a celebration. In New York, we'd built up so slowly, year upon year, slowly working our way bigger and bigger, from the Spiral to Brownie's to the Mercury to Tramp's to the Supper Club, but in London, the accelerated speed with which we'd gone from the Barfly to bigger venues like Dingwalls and The Garage made me feel like playing a massive great hall like the Astoria was only a few months away. The Slur Girls turned up at the Dingwalls aftershow, gushing about the speed of our success. Becky made me sign her copy of Select, laughing about how _she remembered when_ we were still playing the backs rooms of pubs, though it was only a few months previously. But in the crush of grasping strangers and New Best Friends at the aftershow (and I mean, that was what was fucking weird. People who had blatantly ignored me at our album launch party were now suddenly boasting about having known us all along, now that we were getting serious attention?) I was always relieved to see the Slur Girls - well, three girls, one boy, Sandra and the Becks and their mate Josh, the original Dieter wannabe in the long German army coat - turn up at almost every show.

As I stood near the bar, chatting to Sandra about the new Slur album, and their unexpected new Krautrock direction - which to her sounded more than a little inspired by Deltawave, actually - I noticed Becky staring gooily at Doyle, and started to laugh. "Just go over and talk to him," I urged her, feeling more than a little drunk from the celebratory champagne. "He's actually really quite shy, and will probably be relieved not to have to talk to that idiot from Melody Maker any longer."

I dunno; it just gave me a kind of a thrill to see the way her face lit up as Doyle actually turned around and took the time to sign her magazine. Then Becca started talking about how she'd started playing the drums, she'd been so inspired by Metropolis, and I felt my heart swell within my chest.

Doyle's ears pricked up as he made his excuses to the journalist and moved over to join us.  "That is so awesome," he told her. "I'm so... proud. Like, I can remember, when I was a teenager - you guys are totally gonna sneer at this because it's so uncool now, but I remember the first time I heard Mexican Summers - in fact I think it was this little shit who played them in the school lounge, wasn't it, Dan?" He whomped me across the shoulders. "And I was like... _that's_ what I want to do with my life. We recently met Mexican Summers, and it was the biggest honour of my life to tour with them! So, to think that we're inspiring you guys... That's just so... awesome. I'm truly awed. We all are. Like, Dick would be so fucking chuffed to hear that."

Becca made a face like a baby kitten confronted with a cream puff. For a moment, she looked like she was too overwhelmed to even speak, then she quietly asked, "Where is Dick? He never comes to the aftershows."

Scratching his chin thoughtfully, Doyle's face suddenly lit up. "He's probably still tearing down. Wait right here... no, wait. Come with me. Maybe we can catch him before he puts his kit away. He might even give you some tips."

As the three of them, Doyle and the two Becks, hurried off, the Becks exchanged looks of excitement so adorable I wanted to adopt them both. Sandra started to laugh. "You know, Becca is so cool and calm on the outside, but inside she is totally squealing right now."

"You don't have to tell me," I assured her. It was so hot in the venue that I pushed open the door to the canalside balcony and gestured for her to go through. It was so much nicer out on the canal, and a lot less crowded, so I loosened my tie. "I spent half my life worshipping people in bands. You don't even want to know how many times I spent pestering musicians backstage at Brownie's or the Mercury Lounge, when I was her age..."

"It's a bit different for girls, Dan," Sandra giggled, then abruptly caught herself. "Sorry, you're a Daniel, and not a Dan, aren't you?"

"Yes, I prefer Daniel." I was actually quite pleased that she'd noticed. 'Dan' was something I'd done my best to lose after high school, though in a lot of ways, Doyle had never really left high school. Spotting a flight of steps that led down to the water, I trotted down them and perched under a willow tree, feeling the cool breeze off the water lift the curls on my neck. Sandra followed and perched at the other end of the bench, looking up at me with that mixture of hero worship and curiosity that made me feel about ten feet tall. Feeling the flattery of her attention going to my head, I took another sip of champagne, then confessed, "OK, a couple of people call me Danny, which I actually quite like, but we have to be pretty close. Like, my sister calls me Danny. Merry calls me Danny." I blushed as I suddenly remembered Merry, wondering what she would make of all this, then quickly tried to cover it with a quip. "The head of our label, I can always tell how he feels about us, coz he calls me Danny-boy when we're selling well, and _Dan!_ when we're not."

As if noticing my blush at mentioning Merry, Sandra's face changed, seemed to burn with a question she didn't quite have the guts to ask - which was rare for Sandra, who was one of the most blunt and outspoken people I'd ever met - but thankfully she left it unvoiced, though to be honest, I'm not sure how I would have answered it. "OK," she agreed quietly. "I'll call you Daniel when I'm speaking of you, but I'd like to call you Danny when I'm speaking to you."

I blushed, suddenly aware of currents between us which hadn't been there before, or maybe I just hadn't noticed them, with my head full of champagne and flattery. Through the lighted windows of the bar, I could see that Dick had actually, for once, turned up to the aftershow, and was chatting sheepishly with Becca, who was simpering like a little girl and playing with her hair. "Wait," I blurted out. "Becca actually has a crush on Dick?"

Sandra actually burst out laughing, that broad, braying, totally unselfconscious Geordie laugh that I found totally endearing. "Congratulations, Captain Obvious."

Then the penny dropped. "Oh my god, that's what you meant by saying it's different for girls. _Crushes_. Like... do you girls have crushes on your favourite members of Metropolis, the way that, like, Merry had a crush on Graham Cooper from Slur?"

"Merry likes Slur?" Sandra looked surprised. "And her favourite is Graham Cooper? Oh my god, she just gets cooler and cooler, doesn't she? I was wondering how you knew so much about Slur."

I turned around and looked at Sandra, like, really _looked_ at her, sitting at the other end of the bench with the water reflecting silvery willow-tree light up onto her face, instead of just glancing at her like I'd treat a kid sister. I looked at her appraisingly, taking in her curly ginger hair brushed into an asymmetrical wedge, the oversized Annie Hall suit, the spray of badges for obscure indie bands across her lapel and the canvas messenger bag with _Meat Is Murder_ scrawled across it in indelible ink. "So if Becky fancies Doyle, and Becca fancies Dick..." Suddenly I laughed aloud. "Oh my god, I bet you fancy Dieter!"

"Fuck _off_ ," huffed Sandra, protesting a little too loudly. "I do _not_ fancy Dieter!"

"It's alright," I laughed. "Everyone does. I've been aware of his effect on the female of the species for a long time; we did room together at college. I mean, Dieter's pretty cool, even I have to admit. When I was your age, and I first met Dieter, I was pretty impressed with him... if I was a girl, I'd have called that kind of a crush..."

"It's not Dieter, OK?" Sandra insisted, sounding almost irate. "Josh has called bagsy on Dieter so thoroughly, I wouldn't dare, even if I were the slightest bit attracted to that twat."

I took another swig of champagne, staring off into the inky green water of the canal. "So if it's not Dieter you fancy..." My drunken head tried to puzzle through it, then suddenly the realisation dawned. " _Oh_."

As I turned to look at her again, she seemed so completely embarrassed, her face turning beetroot red, that I was almost tempted to laugh aloud. On one level, sure, it was enormously flattering, and I felt my head swelling, like, no wonder rock stars become such ego monsters, with pretty girls telling them they fancy them all the time. But on another level, it was really fucking weird, like, what the fuck? I knew I was not the handsome one in Metropolis, that was Doyle; I was not even the cool, smart one, that was Dieter. So how had I ended up with the smartest, coolest one of the Slur Girls liking _me_? Maybe that was just the way that girls worked in gangs, parcelling out favourite members, like Sandra had just lost the luck of the draw and ended up with me. But the odd way that she was looking at me, half fear and half desire made me realise this was not the case. She had chosen me, and not just because I'd ended up sitting next to her on that night bus, singing the high harmonies on _Yesterday Never Knew_. Then it struck me. She'd told me she was a Graham fan, just like Merry. But Graham Cooper was so obviously the best member of Slur, so how was it the Graham fans kept fancying me?

By then, I'd realised that the silence between us had got heavy, that I really needed to say something, shifting uncomfortably on the narrow bench, but she stopped me, raising her hand. "Please, Danny, just don't. Don't get weird on me, OK? Please don't start hating me, or start getting shirty and distant. It's not what you think. I'm not in love with you, I'm not going to jump you, I know what the deal is, with you and Merry Wythenshawe. But then again, you being with someone as fucking cool and amazing as Merry Wythenshawe, that's part of why I admire you, as far as I'm concerned."

The moment that she said that, whatever undercurrents of tension seemed to be swirling about us, sexual or otherwise, that I might have noticed, seemed to vanish like a stone plopping into the canal. There was a part of me that wanted to protest, hey, you know, I have not seen Merry in _months_ \- and she has not even tried to contact me, either, before you put the whole blame on me - and you know, as a single man, I have needs, and you clearly fancy me, and I think you are adorable, so can we just... in that moment, I understood it. Why Dieter said yes to all those girls that wanted to suck his cock. The flattery, the adulation, it was _intoxicating_. But there was another part of me - a bigger part of me - that secretly thought that the self I had been with Merry was a better self. And that part of me wanted to live up to this adorable girl's image of me. So I said nothing, and did not disabuse her of the notion that Merry and I were still an item.

"Sandra... _Sandra_ ," I tried to interrupt. "It's OK; I understand."

But she ploughed on as if she hadn't heard me. "It's just... admiration, OK? Like, you inspire me. I aspire to be as organised and together, but as creative and... _driven_ as you are. You... and more importantly, your _music_... are just something that are very special to me. Like, I have such an intense emotional connection with your music it almost embarrasses me to talk about it in front of you. So please don't take that away from me by making this awkward or uncomfortable or... _real_."

The sensation in my chest was almost too intense for me to speak. I recognised her emotion intimately; it was the same bundled feeling of love and admiration that I'd felt for Jeanette Flores when I was 19. That wasn't really about Jeanette, either, it was about all of the feelings and aspirations I'd projected onto her. I knew that now; though I'm not sure I'd have recognised it so astutely as Sandra did, back when I was 19. And that kind of awkward self knowledge only made me feel more tender towards the girl.

"It's just a crush, OK?" she finally sputtered, staring at me helplessly, as if simultaneously begging me both to speak, and to remain silent.

I smiled, and though it was crazy, I followed what my inner 19 year old self told me to do. "It's OK," I told her in a soft voice. "I completely understand. But I want you to remember, always..." The champagne swelled my head, and I bent forward to hug her, then kissed her very deliberately on the cheek. "I totally have a crush on _you_ , too."

The look of mingled shock and surprise and happiness and terror on Sandra's face was worth everything. Sandra - ebullient, talkative Sandra - who never stopped gossiping or chatting or singing Slur lyrics for even a moment, she was rendered absolutely speechless, just staring at me, her mouth a perfectly round O of surprise as she raised her hand to her cheek, as if to check it was still there.

"Oh my god," she said, then tried to make a joke of it. "I may never wash my cheek again." But then her face grew completely serious, her voice picking up that rough Geordie edge that meant she meant business. "Thank you. And I mean that. But Daniel, if you _ever_ do anything like that again, I swear I will fucking lamp you."

 

\----------

 

Success. I wanted to say it was a relief when it finally came, because we had got so good at failure for so fucking long, but there was a part of me that just found it hard to believe. The success, as our gigs got bigger and bigger. The success, as our album climbed the British charts - though Gerry warned me, don't think it means anything in terms of sales, you'd be surprised how few copies a single has to sell to chart in Britain. Critical success, however, was a mixed bag.

"You lot are marmite," Emma told us, semi-apologeticaly, as she divided our album reviews into piles of four or five stars, or one star.

"What's marmite?" Dieter asked.

It was Doyle's turn to be triumphant at Dieter's ignorance. "You don't know what marmite is?" he cackled, as Dieter shook his head, looking both mystified and irritated. Doyle got up and walked through into the kitchen of Emma's office, then returned five minutes later, bearing several slices of toast and marmite.

"Oh, cheers," I told him, helping myself to a slice, remembering the familiar salty tang from childhood.

Seeing Doyle and I enjoying it, Dieter seized a slice and took a large mouthful, only for his face to crumple with disgust as the flavour registered. "Oh my god, that's _revolting_. Truly, you Britishers, ugh, I always thought the loathsomeness of your food was exaggerated, but this..." he muttered through a mouthful of bread, before finally giving up, stopping chewing and striding quickly through to the bathroom to spit it out and wash his mouth out.

Emma and I exchanged knowing glances, as we were all starting to, when Dieter acted up, then nodded in agreement. "Yeah, you guys are pretty marmitey to the press. Especially Dieter."

But Deiter's game of cat and mouse with the British press was starting to seriously grate. Noting the cinematic theme of our album art, Loaded Magazine rang up Emma and asked us to provide our favourite films for their Cinema Special. I immediately picked Godard's Jules et Jim, and waxed poetic about French New Wave cinema. Doyle plumped for Blow Up, and Dick chose The Wild Ones because he was on a bit of a Brando kick, wearing muscle shirts and combing his hair into a quiff. (And of course the bastard's quiff looked better than mine, becuase his hair was straight and not curly, dammit.) Dieter, however, just to be provocative, chose Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph Of The Will. "No, really," he clarified, knowing full well his explanation would be cut from the final listicle. "If you ignore the subject matter, the cinematography is absolutely ground-breaking."

If only the British press could have just left it alone, and not given in to Dieter's attention whoring. But no. Loaded, with their childish desire to provoke 'controversy' with outrageous opinions, used a half page photo of Dieter dressed in his military stage gear, with a leather cap pulled down over one eye, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and added a pull-quote declaring only "absolutely ground-breaking". The NME drafted in Niall Kastoori to write 1000 words on the perils of flirtation with fascism, splashed across the cover with the tag line "Putting On The Reich!" To be fair, it was a thoughtful and incisive argument, though I found myself wincing at the way he blamed 'Metropolis' instead of 'Dieter'. I resented being tarred with Dieter's racism, and wanted to protest ' _But I'm not like that_ '. You know, not all white people are racist - and I'm not even German!

Then, to counter, Melody Maker commissioned Jerry Liar to write another 2000 word thinkpiece on artistic freedom and the need to constantly re-examine boundaries, and the importance of wrestling with unacceptable politics in creative works. That one, I agreed with, where it suggested that maybe Kastoori was trying a bit too hard to be offended. 'I'm not offended,' Kastoori replied in the letters page the next week. 'Metropolis remind me of small children trying on signifiers like their parents' clothes, without understanding what they mean. But signifiers still come with weights attached, regardless of artistic intention.' And I didn't know whether to be relieved or insulted. It was getting completely out of control.

A few days later, The Guardian picked up on the scandal of _Whether Dieter Really Meant It_ with a Comment Is Free column. The Guardian thinkpiece had actually bothered getting a quote off Dieter, carefully explaining 'my stage costume is not a Nazi Uniform. It's a German World War I uniform. This is no mere quibble over semantics; it's a statement on prejudice itself. I am half German. If people can't look at a piece of German military memorabilia without automatically assuming, it's German, ergo it must be Nazi, that says way more about their own ethnic and cultural stereotypes than it does about my politics.' The article dug into Dieter's family, brought up his mother's Judaism, and started theorising that the whole thing might be some misogynist rejection of his mother's culture by identifying so strongly with fascism. But for fucks sake, my aunties read The Guardian, I didn't want my family reading about my band's fascist tendencies or supposed misogyny. At that point, I snapped, and got on the phone back to Emma.

"For the love of god, please, can someone rein in Dieter and his obsession with fascism," I begged. "My family read this stuff!"

"I have no intention whatsoever of reining in Dieter or anyone else," Emma laughed. "It's all column inches, and every column inch keeps Metropolis and _Lights! Camera! Action!_ in the public eye. We couldn't pay for this kind of exposure! Trust me, Gerry is delighted; it is not hurting your sales."

Dieter thought it was hilarious, when I confronted him the next morning, in our hotel room. "Why should I pay for therapy, when I can just get psychoanalysed for free in the Guardian? Have you seen what they wrote about my mother... this is absolutely farcical. I have never seen such priceless projection."

"Yes, but what does you mother think about it?"

"Why should I care?" shrugged Dieter, and tossed the Guardian aside.

"But they're your parents," I insisted.

Dieter looked up at me, cocking an arched eyebrow. "Are they?" He stretched and turned away. "It doesn't matter. It's not like they'll read it, anyway. They don't care what I get up to."

But I could not stop staring at him, even as Dieter climbed out of bed and started to shuffle about the room looking for tea. I was just trying to imagine what it might be like, to live without the weight of parents that scoured every international newspaper for news of their son and trumpeted any five-star reviews down the family grapevine like a judgement from God. What it would be like to live without those endless expectations, the pressure of three generations of Ashetons bearing down on one's narrow shoulders. "Is that why you never use your surname?" I said quietly.

"Why should I? It's not _my_ surname." Dieter gave up and hopped back into bed and folding his long limbs beneath him. "Look, are you just going to stand there by the kettle, or are you going to make us some tea?"

And as I busied myself with the tea things, I thought about the Teasmaid my mother had bought me. And then I thought about the promo shoots that my sister had lined up, the video we had paid for with my Mum's birthday money, the apartment on Ludlow St that my father had subsidised for nearly three years. And I wondered what on earth it would be like to live without the weight of all that.

I handed over a cup of tea in silence, but Dieter had picked the Guardian back up and started to read a long piece about Wyndham Lewis in the _Review_ section, so he only nodded and barely mumbled "Cheers" in response, before tapping the paper thoughtfully. "Do you think I should get my hair cut like that, or would that be too _fascist_?"


	21. Angel In The Centrefold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After conquering Europe, Metropolis head back across the Atlantic for the long, slow haul of "Breaking the States" with endless, relentless, backbreaking tours across the continent, all tertiary markets and buy-ons and meet'n'greets with local radio.
> 
> But on the upside, there are fans, and drugs, and groupies galore. However, when Daniel tries, somewhat disastrously, to have sex for the first time since his breakup with Merry, he is forced to realise that he is still not over her. A situation not helped by Deltawave's coverage (or Merry's ~lack~ thereof) in the American media.

After a couple of months in Europe, mostly in the UK, even Dieter was starting to affect a tiny 'British' accent and say "cheers" instead of "thanks". It really was time to go home, but even in the States, there was no rest for the wicked. A week in New York, barely even enough time for a nostalgic secret show at the Lacuna in our new suits - a show so rammed with people that there was sweat dripping off the speakers, and our beautiful new suits all needed to be dry cleaned the next day - and then we were back out on tour. After an NME cover and a glowing review in Spin, and hopefully boosted by a new "live" video that we had shot in London, it was time to start work on cracking the US market.

We might have been a newborn sensation in the UK, but in America we weren't shit, outside of New York and a tiny handful of anglophiles who actually read the NME and followed the British music scene. In a lot of ways, it felt like starting over from scratch. For a start, it was back to being a support band again, 2 months on the road in vans and motels with Mexican Summers that felt a bit like a family reunion, then a month and a half supporting Swerve, a big English alternative band who had been having hits on college radio since I was in middle school.

That was exciting, as they were big shows - OK, not as big as Jezebel, sure - but still enough to make me invest in second guitar amp as backup for my beloved Fender Twin. It was technically a buy-on - we had paid a fee, though Gerry wouldn't tell me how much - but we more than made it back in merch takings at those big shows if we played well enough to intrigue the audience. As soon as our set was over, Doyle and I would towel off our faces and rush to set out a stall at the back of the auditorium, selling albums, t-shirts, autographing anything our fans wanted autographed (and boy did that make me blush, the first time an attractive young woman asked Doyle and I to sign the, erm, derriere of her designer jeans.) But I knew it made a difference, actually interacting with the fans, and we started to convert people that way.

Swerve were a bit funny with us, a bit standoffish backstage, never deigning to talk to their support act, and issuing more and more fussy demands through their tour manager. We didn't have a tour manager, hell, we were still at the stage of humping our own gear, but I took on the responsibility for dealing with all the technical aspects of the tour, honed by my long experience at Windlass. But this tour? Hot damn, was it trying my patience. We were supposed to have a guaranteed forty-minute set, but one night we accidentally ran over by about five minutes because a local DJ had specially requested us to play Sailor To The Sea. An edict came down through the tour manager that our set was now cut to 35 minutes, and we would be fined for each minute we went over that. Playing shorter sets actually made us cut the fat our of our setlists, and deliver shorter, sharper, faster sets, packed with punches from one end to the other, which made Swerve's hour and a half long sets, full of album cuts and obscure tracks from newer, less popular albums, seem bloated by comparison.

One night, I saw their guitarist go over to talk to Trey, the tour soundman, during our soundcheck, and got suspicious. Me, I always stayed sweet with sound people, remembered their names, complimented them, bought them drinks. That wasn't even something Jeanette had taught me, it was something I'd picked up way back in the days I'd hung out at Brownie's while still underage. So after our soundcheck was over, I went out and bought a pack of Altoids mints, the super-strong kind I knew Trey had a weakness for, and just slipped them onto the mixing desk in front of him as a gift.

"So what was that about?" I asked, real casual, like.

Trey helped himself to a handful of candy and started to chuckle. "Would you believe it? Nigel Tufnell there just offered me twenty bucks if I rolled all the bottom end off your rhythm section."

"Twenty bucks?" I stuttered. I mean, I had heard of bands that took a dislike to buy-on support acts, but I had never thought anyone would really stoop to sabotage. I reached for my wallet, but Trey waved it away.

"Put your cash away, kid. I took his twenty, sure, coz a fool and his money are soon parted. But I always root for the underdog. Ain't gonna be you guys suffering from sound problems tonight," he chuckled.

Sure enough, that night, as we sold another two cases of albums to newly converted Metropolis fans in the back of the venue, I laughed inside as Swerve's guitarist grew more and more irate with the lack of signal in his monitors. But two days later, Swerve had the last laugh, as I looked down into the soundbooth while we were setting up, to see an unfamiliar man at the controls.

"What happened to Trey?" I asked, as politely as I could, as I went down after soundcheck to introduce myself. "I'm Daniel, by the way."

"Dave." The new soundman shrugged lightly as he flipped his way through the soloing buttons, searching for a persistent buzz on the monitors. "Trey? Tour manager sacked him; some beef with the lead guitarist."

"Oh my god," I offered lamely, suddenly feeling very guilty for my part in it. "I'm so sorry. I liked Trey a lot. He did good work."

"Don't you worry about Trey," Dave shrugged, suddenly finding the buzz and glaring at Dieter's bass cabinet. "He got snapped up to do onstage sound for the Rolling Stones. They've been after him for ages. Heheheh, you guys... you guitarists, you think you're the irreplaceable ones, the big shots... Ha! I'm the sixth sound engineer this band have had in two years, and I'm only here as a pick-up gig until the Pearl Jam tour starts in the Fall."

"I will keep that in mind, sir," I said quietly, wondering when we would ever get to the point where we could afford a full-time road crew, and how to manage them when we did.

Dave flipped a couple of switches on the board, but the buzzing noise did not go away. "That's your band's equipment, isn't it. Can you do something about that fucking buzz?"

"I'll get right on it, Dave," I told him, then hopped back up the stage. The trouble was easy to identify - fucking Dieter had left his distortion pedal on, and his bass was feeding back slightly. I tapped the footswitch to turn it off, then switched his bass cabinet to standby, and the noise disappeared. Walking to the edge of the stage, I held my arms up in a human question mark, and Dave nodded approvingly and gave me a thumbs up.

"Thanks, Dan, that's sorted it," boomed Dave's disembodied voice from the stage monitors. OK, he'd remembered my name, that was always a good sign. I made a point of checking Dieter's pedals after every soundcheck from then on, and our sound stayed perfect for the rest of the tour. But that night, I made another decision: we were never doing another buy-on, no matter how well our merch sold.

For the rest of the summer, we criss-crossed the Atlantic constantly to hit more summer festivals in Europe, starting with Glastonbury and ending with Reading / Leeds on the August Bank Holiday weekend, with dozens of interchangeable festivals in Germany and Denmark and Spain in between. On good nights, we played quite late on smaller stages, the audience going nuts for us in crowded tents. On bad days, we'd end up first or second on at the main stage, feeling very overwhelmed at the prospect of playing in broad daylight, to a sparsely populated field full of people paying more attention to their picnics than us. The jet lag was ferocious and again, Doyle and I lost track of whether we were supposed to be speaking English, French, German or Spanish, our patter degenerating into some weird Eurotrash hipsterese. We hired backline for festivals in Europe, partly because I was learning to be completely suspicious of the effects of weird European current on vintage amps, but mostly to save the expense of shipping, as our own air miles were bad enough. By the end of the summer, my passport was running out of space for visa stamps.

But it was cool, playing in Europe again, as, initially at least, we got much bigger much faster there. The Slur Girls - or rather the Web Girls, as they had become - turned up backstage at a couple of our British shows. Sandra was now not just running our now-official website and fan club / mailing list, but also working part time for Emma, doing press, as our requirements had overrun her one-person operation. It was good to know that Metropolis' success was floating our friends' boats, as well as our own. I always went out of my way to be sweet to Sandra, knowing how much it both delighted and yet flummoxed her when I flirted with her, but her loyalty was the most flattering gift I ever received.

I liked calling the London Office and getting her on the phone, I liked the way she'd always chat with me, would always agree with me about how ridiculous whatever Dieter's latest stunt was. I mean, it wasn't quite as bad as Team Elisha and Team Merry had been, back in my Deltawave days, but I liked knowing that someone on our team _got_ me, and understood where I was coming from, and was usually on my side. (Though trust me, Sandra was not afraid to tell me off when I was out of line, something I came to have a huge grudging respect for. She became someone whose opinion I trusted, more than I trusted anyone else within the growing organisation structured around our band.)

Especially at festivals, I was just happy to see a familiar face turn up in the VIP area, waving at me through the crowd and bouncing up to me, insisting that I share a pint of foamy cider with her before dragging me off to see some deeply obscure band in a far-flung field. But hot damn, was I relieved to see her turn up at Glastonbury. Glastonbury had turned into an impromptu Ludlow Street reunion, as Jeremy Rocket Pop had somehow bummed a lift in our van, claiming his own band were heading down far too late to have any fun. Within thirty seconds of his sitting down in the back of the van, it was quite clear that he and Dieter had precisely the same idea of _fun_ , as the pair of them started chopping out lines of coke on the back of the guitar amp we used as a table, so that they were both wrecked before we even passed Swindon.

Once we got got to Glastonbury, it became obvious that Jeremy's interest in getting to the site early had less to do with music, and more to do with banging Kate Gordon, who soon turned up, resplendent in a T-shirt that declared "Drunken Groupie-Magnet Charm", as if revelling in her trouble-on-legs reputation. So when Sandra arrived with her comedy sunglasses and her wine-box of Pear Cider, and told me that if I wanted my life changed forever, I should go and see Xandrine Dream in the Rainbow Musick Tent, I followed her with some considerable amount of relief. You know, if I had wanted to spend the rest of my life taking drugs with Rocket Pops and Charms, I could have just stayed in the fucking Lacuna Lounge.

So all that summer, yes, while Dieter and Doyle debauched their way through Europe, I went off with Sandra - or with Dick, who was similarly unimpressed with cocaine and groupies - to watch Xandrine Dream in a rainbow coloured tent at Glastonbury, or watch Mirage demolish the stage at Roskilde with a blistering version of _Rock N Roll Must Die Forever_ , or even - the highlight of my musical summer - watch Slur perform in Technicolor glory as the sun set over the Leeds Festival. (With Sandra singing along beside me, with the same fangirl gusto she'd once sung the same songs on a night bus, so loudly that Graham Cooper even turned around, and then actually _winked_ at her enthusiasm.)

In the autumn, we did another jaunt round America, Metropolis and two other new bands trying to work their debut albums, hitting 'tertiary markets' as part of a package tour sponsored by a brand of trainers (Trainers! Us! As if! But they paid for the bus we shared, in exchange for pictures of the shoes and the brand name on the side of it and on the marquees and ticket stubs.) That was grim, yes, and there were cities in the Midwest I never ever wanted to see again in my life, but Gerry told me that those kids in tertiary markets, they were loyal. Playing in places like, Burlington, Vermont or wherever, college towns like that, might not be as cool as the big city crowds, but the kids there bought a lot of records, and they kept on buying them when the cool kids had given up and moved on to the next hip thing.

But again, something was very obviously brewing on that tour. The three bands were supposed to be co-headliners, and we rotated the running order every night so no one band got stuck opening all the time. But I'd started to notice, going out into the crowd to man our merch stand, that on the nights we played first or second, the venue cleared out soon after we played, leaving the "headliner" to go on to a half-empty room. When we played last, the room just got more and more full. We weren't just getting the occasional video placements on 120 Minutes; we were starting to pick up a ton of Modern Rock and College Radio play. In the afternoons, before gigs, I did a lot of meet'n'greets and pumped a lot of flesh at college radio stations, but it was starting to get us into the pages of the CMJ.

Finally, after a few weeks off in a sweltering NYC Indian Summer, we got to do our first proper headlining American tour. By this point, it was a bit weird to go back to the same cities, sometimes for the 3rd or 4th time in as many months, but each time playing higher up the bill, or at a bigger venue. But the first time that we rolled into a town, pulled up outside the theatre, and saw our name blazoned across the marquee - our name in lights, for real - let me tell you what a thrill that was. I stopped taking photos after about 3 or 4 venues, but the thrill of feeling like a movie star, pulling up with our U-Haul, to a theatre that declared METROPOLIS on the board outside, that never wore off.

The crowds grew bigger with the larger venues, but oddly, I was starting to recognise regular fans - hell, despite the whole experience with the Slur Girls, it was still a shock to me to _have_ regular fans! - as they waited outside the venue after the show, asking politely for autographs or hugs. Like, I could not believe people would actually wait out there for us; it was such a humbling experience. OK, so usually it was Dieter they wanted - and fucking Dieter didn't have the time for anyone unless they were young, female, attractive, and preferably were carrying some kind of drug. But, remembering the times that I had hung around by the backstage area at Brownie's as a teenager, I always took the time to stop and say hello and sign ticket stubs and copies of our CD. I made a point of being nice to them, thanking them for the small gifts they occasionally brought, and reminding myself that their devotion provided the means for us to do all of this. All that love! I just felt _humbled_ by that love. It was still weird for me, feeling like such a fanboy myself when I met Graham Cooper - or that crazy time I'd run into Mirage and the Chemical Brothers while hanging out with Jeremy and the Rocket Pops dudes, backstage at the legendary Glastonbury Festival - to accept that I, now, had fans.

Doyle went back and forth on fans. He had been really happy when we were on tour with Mexican Summers, and that showed in his interactions with the fans, like the way he'd gone and introduced Becca to Dick, back at Dingwalls. The way that Jorge mentored him, took him under his wing, I suspected, made Doyle remember that fandom was important, that it was inspiring and uplifting and made a difference in kids' lives. And on those legs of the tour, Doyle really went out of his way to speak to fans - though he still resented doing interviews - and made an effort to sign autographs and pose for photos, putting a fraternal arm around female fans' shoulders without even being asked, especially if they were attractive.

And then Dieter would do something disgusting, pull a scene with a girl, try to bring a groupie in the van to the next show (there was _no room_ in the van for random girls, and the one time Dieter insisted "but she can just sit on my lap..." of course he had got bored with that after only 20 miles, and the poor girl had ended up squeezed into the tiny jump seat between Dick and me.) Then Doyle would start to exude that sense of tension and resentment again, and Dick and I would be the only ones actually signing autographs at the stage door. My signature was decaying as the tour progressed, and we did more and more signings at record stores and radio stations. "Daniel J. Asheton" became "Danl Ast--" became "DnA" and then disintegrated in a D-squiggle as my wrist gave out after the 300th girl in a row asked for my autograph.

Girls. It was the endless girls on tour that never failed to amaze me. You would have thought I'd have got used to it, but I never stopped feeling about girls like I'd felt with Sandra that night on the canal in Camden, red-faced and flustered, like, _what_? You like _me_? Dieter treated the girls that flocked around the band like a smorgasboard laid on for his delight, just like the beer backstage and the lines of coke that people offered us after the show. I had a strict No Drugs When Working policy, so I never indulged before shows, and the one time I gave into the peer pressure of my bandmates and did a line at an aftershow, I didn't sleep for the rest of the night, sitting up all night, feeling completely out of control, my sense of self blown up like a balloon waiting to be punctured, my teeth chattering and muttering to myself at speed as Dieter banged some chick in the other bed. Like, you know, pot I could understand, it made me spacey and relaxed and kinda sensual, if sometimes a bit paranoid, but coke? I didn't try that again in a hurry.

Doyle went back and forth on girls, too. Every time he spent the evening holed up, talking to a beautiful woman, bonding with her and staring into her eyes, he seemed _surprised_ that she then wanted to go to bed with him, or at least give him a quick blowjob in the back of the van. _Doyle was just lonely_ , I remembered Merry had told me, it seemed like a million years ago now. Both Doyle and Dieter rampaged through girls while they were on tour, but the way that they ploughed through girls was completely different. Dieter would sidle up to women and draw them into chats under the most flimsy pretences, in order to lure them off and bang them as quickly as he could legitimately get his rocks off. Doyle, on the other hand, seemed to use the promise of sex as a way to get women to just pay attention to him, listen to him, mother him a bit for a few hours, before he had to settle the receipt with his beautiful athlete's body.

And me? Well, to be honest, I found the whole thing completely fucking weird. It was not that I wasn't flattered by the attention - come on, attractive women, hanging on my every word, thrusting their bodies at me and gazing at me with those bedroom eyes, full of hero worship and sin? I should have found it a dream come true: easy sex, no strings, no fuss, and all I had to do was walk out onto a stage holding a guitar. But that was the problem. It felt _too_ easy. I didn't believe it. Especially when I became painfully aware of a kind of pecking order within the band, watching girls first try it on with Dieter, then try it on with Doyle, before being rebuffed and trying their attentions on me? Come on, did they really see no difference between Dieter and myself, like they just wanted to get with someone - anyone - out of Metropolis, and they didn't care which one? That made me feel really kinda icky and gross, to be honest. It made it harder for me to have conversations with any women, really, even girls I might have been seriously interested in, had we met under different circumstances. There was always that constant fear lurking in the back of my mind, that really they would rather be thrusting their pretty faces and heaving chests at Dieter or Doyle instead.

I tried to get into the spirit of it. I even gave up and indulged at least once, just to see what it was like, you understand. I had got off with a tall, pretty, blonde radio DJ in Portland, Oregon, who had just slayed me with her knowledge of obscure Smiths B-sides and 1960s freak beat compilations. We'd sat for most of the night in a dark corner of the aftershow, drinking French wine and comparing record collections and concerts we'd attended as teenagers. So when she turned to me, at 2 am, and said "Would you mind if I kissed you?" I was overwhelmed with nostalgia and good will, and said sure.

After we'd kissed for a bit, and got kind of heavy with the groping, she'd bent down and unfastened my flies, and blown me, right there in the dark booth of the messy nightclub. I was too astonished to protest, and slightly drunk, and yes, I realised as her lips worked on me, very very horny. All I could think of was Merry, drunkenly watching that blonde head bobbing in my lap, and I felt myself quiver and then spasm as that thought took over my mind. The orgasm had been so unexpected I didn't even have time to prepare for it, let alone enjoy it. But after I came, it was just like the cocaine: the comedown and the guilt and the overwhelming feeling of _oh shit what have I become_? completely overshadowed any post-coital bliss I might have experienced.

And as she wiped her mouth and straightened up, she must have seen the look in my eyes, because the expression on her face just made me feel like a complete scoundrel. "Can I do something for you?" I tried to offer, but she just shook her head and did her best to straighten her hair.

"No, that's alright. It's fine."

"Do you want to come back to my hotel or..." My brain just stopped as my jaw flopped around for a bit, struggling to recall her name, but that bit of information was just gone, vanished by too much wine and the heat of the club and the lateness of the hour. _Jesus Christ_ , I thought to myself. _I have forgotten her name_ , followed two seconds later by the explosion of guilt and self loathing at the idea that I had become _the kind of man_ who had sex with women whose names I did not even remember.

We stared at each other awkwardly for a few moments, then she shook her head decisively. "No, I think that's a very bad idea, Dan. I'm sorry... I shouldn't have done that, it was just the moment, and... you seemed like you were into it, but really... you aren't into it, are you?"

I shook my head, far more slowly, and with conflicted emotions tearing my heart apart. I liked her; no really, I did like her. But it was the kind of liking I had for... for Sandra, and Emma, and the girls I chatted excitedly about music with. Sex was... well, it was something else, I thought, suddenly trying to straighten my clothes, pulling down my shirt back down over my scrawny, hairless chest and buttoning my trousers over the thick, stubby, rather ugly cock I suddenly felt slightly ashamed of. This was the part of sex I'd _hated_ before... well, before Merry. After the rush of lust and horniness had worn off, the idea of being naked and... well, not even naked, just vulnerable and exposed in front a stranger.

"No, I'm sorry. Not really. It's not you, honestly... you're lovely. It's just... I'm still kind of in love with someone else." It wasn't even a white lie, like I'd wanted to represent my _best self_ to Sandra. It was the first time I'd actually had sex with someone who wasn't Merry, and all it had done was made me realise how much I still just wanted _Merry_. Lying, naked, with Merry in my arms, after we'd had sex, that had been so different. It had felt like a long, warm bath of trust and acceptance and mutual delight in each other's company, that always lasted long after the trickle of orgasm had worn off. The tide of self-loathing was washed by another wave, this one of shame, that I was so stupid, so sentimental, so like a _girl_ , when it came to banging.

"I know," she sighed, and at that, her expression cheered up slightly. "I read about you in the NME last _year_ , I know exactly who you're in love with, I know who most of your songs are about, and I know exactly who has just released a single with a B-side called _Daniel_."

That hit me with full force in the chest. I hadn't even known. Back when I'd been working at Windlass, I would have known, would have had to approve every B-side before it went on a single. But back when I was working at Windlass, and Merry and I were still together, she would never have been allowed to even _write_ a song called _Daniel_.

Merry and I had never officially broken up. That was the weird thing. It wasn't like one day we sat down and had a conversation, and said, this isn't working any more, we never see each other, that means we're not a couple any more. It had simply happened without my ever really noticing it, let alone my agreeing to it. Like I said, it wasn't just me neglecting to call her for a month that became two that became six that became a year. She didn't try to get in touch with me, either. I mean, I did my best to keep up with her career, I still watched out for Deltawave on the charts, and I saw their third single shoot up into the Top 10, buoyed up by the Jezebel tour. But I hadn't even gone into a shop and bought that single, and that showed the depth of how far apart she and I had drifted - and how little I'd noticed.

Early the next morning, my now-familiar tour insomnia shaking me from my motel bed while the rest of my band slept off their hangovers, I walked into the centre of Portland and guiltily bought the single, with a sheepish smile for the counter clerk I'd chatted to during our own signing the previous day. "If you want to listen to it, there's a booth in back," he offered, and I was grateful for the chance to hear it in the anonymity of a record shop, instead of making excuses and offering explanations in the tour van.

Guitar. There was guitar on the track, a jaunty, stabby Dead Letters jangle. How on earth had Elisha ever allowed that? I checked the liner notes to see who played it - Merry? Then it hit me like the wet slap of the reverb. Was she taking the piss out of _my_ guitar style? Then the lyrics hit me. The first line was a deliberate Lloyd Cole reference - how many afternoons had we spent trying to spot Lloyd Cole on Bleecker Street? - that stopped my breath mid-intake. " _Daniel is a boy that I hate to love the way I do_..." but that was it, that was the whole of it, the first word, my first name, before the lyrics skittered off in some other direction. It was about loneliness, it was about isolation, it was about nights in hotel rooms listening to radio because songs were speaking directly to you. All the same fucking shit I had felt without her. And that vocal hook on the chorus - _I'm the sweetheart of the radio_ \- god, that was such a Merry pun, I thought, remembering her "Gram Parsons rodeo shirt" that she wore sometimes in the summer when she was doing _Cowgirl_ costume. Of course she was the sweetheart of the radio - their second single had gone to number 6, and the third was still climbing the charts. She was the sweetheart of the radio now, but not my sweetheart. Not any more.

But still, I started to read her interviews again, obsessively, scanning the words for any mention of myself, of any leftover feelings for me, even though I knew that Michael had explicitly forbid any mention of _boyfriends_. But that knowledge also chilled me - it was entirely possible that she'd just met someone else, and how would I ever know? That song - _Daniel_ \- it seemed like an ending, not an acknowledgement. A final kiss-off, but jesus, what a kiss-off, a song in the charts with my name on the B-side. Well, fuck you, Merry, I got a song in the charts, too. Granted, the charts that Metropolis dominated were CMJ and college radio, though we were definitely making inroads on Billboard's Modern Rock charts, if only all the post-Yes-TRS-80 Radioshack tribute bands would get out of the way. I wondered if she ever heard Rated Frustrated coming on in coffee shops and bars the way that I heard Deltawave, constantly, once even coming over the venue's soundsystem as a line-check before we soundchecked. And I wondered, if she did, did it ever make her feel happy, bouncing around the room, like she used to do, down the front, singing along, at the Mercury Lounge. Or did it make her feel sad and slightly lonesome, like I felt sad and slightly lonesome when I heard Deltawave songs? And then I shook my head, and realised that she probably didn't even remember ever playing shitty gigs with us at the Mercury Lounge now that she'd toured with Jezebel.

But then, as I sat waiting for my band to gather in a vegan coffeeshop in Santa Monica, a shadow fell over me as I basked in the sun, and drops of seawater dripped on my suit. I looked up to see Doyle, still sopping wet from an early morning surfing session. He dropped a copy of Rolling Stone on the table. "Yes. Lolly Dollanger in a schoolgirl uniform, very attractive, thank you, but more your type than mine," I drawled.

"Check the inside index." Doyle sat opposite me, blocking my sun. "You need to hear about this from a friend, not a stranger."

I opened the index, and there was a photo of Merry, standing in a similarly sunlit room, stark naked with her arms folded across her breasts. My ex fucking girlfriend, naked in Rolling Stone. It was like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room and the sun had just been switched off. Why did she have to be naked? Why did she have to remind me that she had once been a stripper? Why did she have to flaunt her body like that, didn't she remember how it drove me fucking crazy, both with irritation and desire?

"It's a good interview, despite the pictures," Doyle assured me, but the idea that Doyle had been looking at naked photos of my ex girlfriend just made me hate Doyle a little. I turned to page 28.

 _Merry Wythenshawe As You've Never Seen Her Before_ , _The Rolling Stone Interview_ , with another, larger, more provocative photo, blown up full page, so I could see the underside of her breasts as she reached up with one hand to push her hair out of her face, could trace the all too familiar outline of the celtic knot tattoo on her shoulder, could see a shadow of the top of the tiny patch of blonde hair at the bottom of her belly. It somehow pleased me that she still wore her pubes natural, like she was still a little tiny bit the same girl I'd once fucked, underneath all those pop star trappings. But how the fuck had Rolling Stone not airbrushed that, either the patch of private hair, or the hint of a belly, even though that rounded hint of a belly secretly drove me completely wild, knowing how good it felt to rest my forehead against it between bouts of licking her clitoris until she moaned. Her hair was slightly tousled, not even blow-dryed straight but left to curl slightly about her shoulders, with honey-coloured roots showing beneath the silver dye job. Even though she wasn't wearing makeup and her freckles showed, it somehow made her look even more like a 60s filmstar, a young Jane Fonda, or Brigitte Bardot smouldering her way through Contempt. With her hair pushed back, I could see that she was wearing emerald earrings. The emerald earrings I had given her for Christmas the previous year. It seemed like another lifetime ago.

Merry Wythenshawe doesn't like interviews. She doesn't turn up to the first Deltawave interview we schedule. And though keyboardist Elisha and drummer Gabriel are friendly and chatty, we still feel cheated. It's Merry that the public are fascinated by, Merry who exudes the atmosphere of the intriguing fantasy-world that Deltawave are famous for, and it's Merry we ring back to reschedule an interview with. Finally, she agrees, though only under the condition that Gabriel also attends.

"I don't understand why everyone wants to talk to me. Except for a couple of B-sides, I don't even write the songs, I just stand on the stage singing them, mouthing Elisha's words. I'm not the songwriter; Elisha is. You might as well talk to Gabriel, he's got better stories, anyway. He doesn't drink as much, so he remembers more."

Gabriel is her "oldest friend in New York City," their friendship predating the forming of the band by a couple of years. When I ask how they met, she relaxes and smiles for the first time.

"It was way back when I first moved to NYC, and I didn't know anyone, didn't know anything. I had just played a gig with the Bunnygirls (her first band - ed.) at some dump - I think it was the Spiral? - and we'd stupidly blown most of our payment on beer, so I was drunk out of my mind. I didn't even know how it worked, how to be professional and save the money we earned because I thought I was a rock star, you know? I didn't even know that the F train stopped running late at night, so I went down to the 2nd Avenue subway stop and sat there, like a compete muppet, waiting for a train that never showed up. And it was snowing pretty hard that night, and I was so drunk that when I finally wised up and tried to get out of the station, I actually fell _up_ the stairs, and cracked my forehead open on the concrete. I was so drunk I had no idea what had just happened, and after checking my bass was OK, I just staggered out into the snow, deciding that I would have to walk the 8 blocks or whatever to the N/R. And as I'm struggling to get across the central reservation of Houston Street, this angel, dressed all in white, comes up to me and asks if I'm OK. I thought I was dead!"

"She looked an absolute fucking sight, just staggering up out of the station, streams of blood pouring down her face. I thought she'd been mugged, so I asked if she was alright, and the moment I heard her accent, I realised, she was British - and completely clueless - so I felt some kind of obligation to get her off the street and get her home," Gabe supplies.

"He put me in a taxi - which I didn't even want to get into at first, until he said he'd come with me, because I still don't trust taxi drivers - and he was trying to persuade me to go to an emergency room, but I was just saying no, no, no, no, because I didn't have insurance, and I didn't want to get stuck with the bill. So instead he pays for the taxi ride all the way out to Queens, and he cleans me up and sits with me, all night, at the Court Square Diner, plying me with coffee to make me stay awake and make sure I didn't have concussion. And we chatted, about growing up in England at first, but then about music, because he was curious about the bass, and he told me that he used to play drums, back at school, and I was like, oh my god, this is _fate_ , we have to do this."

"She talked me into getting my uncle to ship my old drumkit over, and we started meeting up every week to play together. She had the idea that we were going to become a mobile rhythm section, available for hire, like, that should have been pretty good money. But Merry kept falling in love with the bands and cutting them deals..."

"No, no, don't say that, you make me sound like some kind of hooker with a heart of gold," Merry laughs. Merry's laugh is infectious, and she sets Gabriel off.

"Yeah, session bassist with a heart of gold, that's you. I don't mean fall in love, like, fall in love with dudes. I never saw Merry lose her cool over a dude - OK, well, maybe once, and we all know who that was with - but she definitely fell in love with _bands_ , she would move in on them and take them over and try to mould them in her own image. That was often the problem, that Merry has always had such a strong sense of who she is, musically, and such a clear sense of vision and aesthetics - like, she will take a little song, and turn it into a whole fucking world - and nine times out of ten, she ended up arranging these dudes' songs, and writing basslines and backing vocals and string sections and keyboard parts and shit, and man, did those dudes ever not like that. Because Merry was always about ten times more talented than them, and even their girlfriends would start squealing for Merry onstage, and then we'd be out of a gig."

Was Elisha like that, back in the Down Time days?

"No, Elisha was not like that," insists Merry. "And that's why we started working with Elisha, and that was why we carried on working with Elisha, even when it looked like there was never going to be any serious cash in it..." Merry and Gabriel exchange glances and set each other off laughing again. Deltawave's album has already been certified Gold, and will reach Platinum by press time, at the end of their tour. "He just let us get on with it. Our music would start with: Elisha writes the songs and presents them to us, but it wouldn't end there; it was always like the songs were supposed to be a conversation. Sometimes literally, in fact, like Elisha would write his vocals, then I would get on the mic and sing right back at him, like I was pretending to be the girl in the song, talking back to him. I always hated that about 'Dude Songs About Girls', like, why is it that He gets to say his piece, but She never gets to say hers? I like duets, I like Answer Records and rap battles, like Roxanne Roxanne and Roxanne's Revenge, shit like that. And that's what Elisha let me do."

And that was exactly what Merry found herself doing to great effect, on the first Metropolis single, the fan favourite B-side, Sailor To The Sea, where Merry takes the role of siren to Doyle Saunder's wandering poet, calling him on, to greater heights or crash on the rocks. There has been a long friendship between Deltawave and Metropolis - is Merry 'the girl' in any Metropolis songs?

She cuts that off sweetly, but sharply. "I don't think it's fair to talk about that? If you want to talk about Metropolis' songs, you should maybe ask Metropolis cause we don't speak much any more." Then she deftly changes the subject back to her own band. "If you want to get psychological, this is at the heart of all my discomfort with being pushed forward as the face of Deltawave, of having to be at the centre of the photos, of being asked for... solo interviews. Because I never signed up to be the frontman, you know? We started this band, pretty much from day one, with the idea that it was going to be a boy/girl thing, that it was going to be a _conversation_. But, you know, you want your record to go Platinum, you have to make some compromises. That doesn't mean you have to be happy with them."

There was a bit more, talking about the Jezebel tour, about balancing their love of big, cartoony pop with the weird, off-kiltre Deltawave sensibility, but I already knew all about that. Merry and I had discussed it many times while lying on the sofa in that Ludlow Street apartment, playing each another records...

And then abruptly Dieter appeared, with some LA Goth chick in a leather corset in tow, and it was time for me to stop reading Rolling Stone and mooning over my ex, and go off to the next music industry meeting with KROQ or whoever we would spend the morning wooing. It had just opened up too many memories, pulled at the unhealed scabs of my broken heart... oh shit. The scar above her eyebrow that I loved so much. Was that the result of that drunken night with Gabe? They usually airbrushed it in photos, but I always looked for it, to check that she was still the girl I'd known. I could see the tiny silvery sliver of it in the large, blown-up photo on page 29, like it was mocking me with memories of her.

But the rest of the interview irked me. She was right. If Rolling Stone wanted to talk about Metropolis songs, why the fuck didn't they ask Metropolis? It was like she was deliberately rubbing it in my face, Rolling Stone want to interview her but they don't want to interview you. But fuck that, I was going to get on the cover of Spin Magazine, where _she_ would have to look at me, if it cost me the earth in brown-nosing to do it. Even if it cost the four of us stripping off our Italian suits and appearing in _our_ underpants to do it. (OK, maybe not that far, but you never know...)


	22. Video Builds The Radio Star

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In response to Merry's topless photos for Rolling Stone, Metropolis decide to go down the beefcake, shirtless route in order to win heavy rotation on KROQ.
> 
> And Daniel, finally, gets a decent haircut.

My head was still full of Merry and her topless photo shoot as we went into the meeting with KROQ, even as I tried to be completely professional, knowing how much was at stake. We'd spent ages trying to set up a meeting with KROQ, and even Gerry hadn't been able to engineer it. In point of fact, it had been organised by one of my old contacts from my Windlass days, who worked as a radio plugger in LA. I'd done her a whole series of favours during my tenure in the accounting department, expediting her expenses, so she kinda owed me, and anyway, she liked me, and agreed to take on Metropolis basically on spec. So she had brokered a brunch meeting with a couple of people from the programming team at KROQ.

The World-Famous KROQ! I mean, even if I was a New Yorker to the bone - well, bred, if not quite born - I was certainly aware of the history and reputation of the radio station. During the 80s, they had almost single-handedly invented the Modern Rock Radio format, and helped define the Alternative genre that I'd grown up with. I couldn't even count the number of bands that they had either broken nationally - from Blondie and the Talking Heads in the 70s - or first introduced to an American audience, including all of the original British punk and new wave bands like The Curse and The Nothings. When Billboard Magazine, my bible, had introduced the Modern Rock charts in the late 80s, it was based almost entirely on the format that KROQ had devised. They had that kind of power, that Billboard changed to suit them, instead of them bending to Billboard's charts.

Sure, some people sneered at them - Jorge and Jeanette from Mexican Summers reviled them as some kind of cool-hunting vampires, mining the underground for new sacrificial victims to burn on the altar of Selling Out. Mexican Summers wanted nothing to do with KROQ, some ancient beef that seemed to have involved Dead Letters' move to a major label. Jorge had sneered that KROQ had just invented a new genre by taking all the women and People of Colour out of the regular charts, and seeing how he was one and Jeanette was the other, they hadn't stood a chance. (As if Blondie and the Go-Gos, both of whom had been on their playlists, weren't chicks?) But I dunno, that was just the way that Jorge talked, and maybe that was just sour grapes. Because I did have to wonder if their refusal to play ball with KROQ was one of the reasons that Mexican Summers were still playing the indie circuit, and Dead Letters were playing stadiums. There was always going to be a jagged and uneasy slippage between the underground and the mainstream. But it didn't seem to me like Billboard and the mainstream mined KROQ. It seemed to me like KROQ drove the operation. And I wanted in.

So over coffee and weird Californian bagels (avocado? on a bagel? what the fuck?) Deirdre, our plugger, seemed to be fighting a battle on both sides, on one hand making a pitch to KROQ that Metropolis were the newest, hippest thing since sliced Nirvana, and that they should grab us before we got too hot to handle, and on the other hand, trying to persuade the more reluctant members of Metropolis that getting into bed with KROQ was not selling out, but a wise career move. Dick and I were totally up for it, both of us were ambitious enough to know that this was the step up to the next level. Doyle was on the fence. I mean, I knew Doyle was ambitious, but I also knew that he respected Mexican Summers, and their words of warning were echoing in his head. Dieter, man, it was impossible to get a handle on what Dieter really wanted sometimes. On one hand, he was a total snob, and when Deirdre started talking about the latest crop of bands that KROQ had successfully championed - people like Sublime, Smash Mouth, Blink 182 and The Offspring - his lip started to curl with disgust. But on the other hand, I knew Dieter also just wanted to be fucking famous. With an emphasis on the _fucking_.

The programming bods from KROQ - a surfer looking dude called Steve and an attractive young woman named Mona with stylish clothes and a slightly punky haircut - browsed through our press kit, reading the reviews and interviews from the NME and Melody Maker. I could see that Mona's eye was caught by the Select cover, her gaze flicking up towards Dieter, slouching, bored and petulant, in a chair opposite.

"So I hear you guys are really into Dead Letters," she drawled, in that flat, nasal So-Cal accent.

Dieter rolled his eyes extravagantly, and I cringed slightly, but Doyle actually stood up, left the table and started wandering around the meeting room. "Really, I think we've all had enough of the Dead Letters comparisons at this point," I replied diplomatically, seeing the whole, carefully constructed plan to get us into the Billboard charts falling apart before my eyes.

To her credit, Deirdre leapt into the awkward silence. "Well, definitely, they have a Dead Letters kind of flavour, but Metropolis have a more modern, updated take on the whole post-punk thing. The NME has called them the leader of the pack spear-heading the next wave of Intelligent Rock Music - see, that's a pun on the latest genre of 'Intelligent Dance Music' or IDM, which is currently the next big thing in the UK..."

Across the room, Doyle snorted loudly, then fell to examining a photograph album full of the history of KROQ, with the various bands that had graced their studios over the years. "Hey," he suddenly interjected. "The Red Hot Chilli Peppers."

"Ugh," Dieter retorted, disgust creasing his face. "I loathe that band. All bassists - apart from maybe Bootsy Collins - who 'pop' or otherwise play with their thumbs should have the offending digits amputated. Without anaesthetic."

Mona giggled, the way girls always giggled at Dieter when he was being outrageous, but Steve got up and moved over to stand by Doyle. "You a fan of the Chilli Peppers? We partnered with them, did a lot of work with them when they started out. Here's some of the promotional stuff we did with them, that really broke them on a nationwide level..."

"I love them, man," Doyle said, louder than was really necessary, and almost certainly for Dieter's benefit, then suddenly he started to laugh. "Oh my god, the sock poster. That's hilarious."

"KROQ had those up on billboards across LA," Steve explained. "Really got people's attention."

"Ha ha we should do something like that," Doyle laughed, flicking through the photo album.

"Like what?" Now Dieter was on his feet, his curiosity piqued.

It took me a minute to work out what 'sock poster' Doyle was on about, casting my mind back through RHCP album covers and advertising campaigns... Oh. The infamous photos where they'd all appeared naked except for socks covering their genitals. "No, no way," I sputtered.

But as Dieter stared at the photo in disgust, it only seemed to spur Doyle on. In fact, Doyle now seemed totally in favour of the whole KROQ thing, if only because Dieter objected to it. "Come on, Daniel, you were joking about it in the cab ride over here. You said, and I quote, you'd strip off your Italian suit, strip down to your underwear, to get a Top 40 hit."

"Yes, I was joking," I protested.

"Our next single is P.U.A. That' s about a sleazy, Venice Boardwalk, Pick-Up Artist kinda guy, so let's all get our inner Anthony Kiedis out for the shoot." Doyle grinned at Dieter with that needling look in his eye. "I'm with Merry. I'll totally go shirtless to promote the band. Will you?"

As Dieter drew himself up to his full height and puffed out his chest in indignation, Mona's eyes lit up. "I think it's a brilliant idea, don't you, Deirdre?" she enthused, looking back and forth between Doyle and Dieter, standing facing each off over the photo album. "Should we get some of the guys from the publicity department in on the meeting here? I'm picturing a co-ordinated campaign, Metropolis posing shirtless in some beefcake shots for a KROQ billboard campaign, while we back that up by getting behind - what did you say was the name of the next single - P.U.A.? - getting P.U.A. on heavy rotation, maybe getting you guys on the air for some live interviews, perhaps record some exclusive live tracks for us at your show tonight..."

Deirdre looked absolutely triumphant, or maybe she was just pleased that now Musketeer would actually have to pay her if we got onto KROQ's playlist. "Excellent idea! I love it! How soon can we get the guys from publicity down here?"

"I'll ring them now," Mona suggested, picking up the phone.

"Look, whoa, whoa no, it was a joke, he wasn't serious," I protested. "There's no way we're doing this, right, Dieter?"

But Dieter had started flipping through the photograph album himself. "Hang on, this is Depeche Mode," he observed. "Music For The Masses tour, in fact, these look like candid shots backstage at the Pasadena Rose Bowl... are these outakes from Depeche Mode 101?" Dieter was a massive Depeche Mode fan; had been since high school. I swear, he had watched 101 maybe a hundred and one times while I was living with him at college.

"Well, we were heavily involved with the promotion of that Pasadena Rose Bowl show," Steve explained proudly. "We were one of the first commercial stations in the country to play Depeche Mode, as far back as _Everything Counts_ and _Blasphemous Rumours_."

Now it was Dieter's turn to look awed. "Blasphemous Rumours is the song I want played at my funeral..."

Mona put down the phone and smiled brightly. "Publicity say they'll come up in about fifteen minutes? They _love_ the idea. They've already come up with the strap line - _Pick Up Metropolis, on KROQ!_ Amanda's going to call around and see if they can set up an impromptu photo shoot tomorrow morning while Tammy's going to investigate how quickly she can round up billboard space in Hollywood. You guys will still be in town tomorrow morning, after your show tonight, right? Oh, Steve - we should get some more coffee and bagels. Who did you call for catering?"

"Wait, wait," I protested. "Can we back up, please? Billboards? Around LA? With us, topless, on them? No! Absolutely not. That's absurd! I was _joking_ about it, because I was actually outraged about Merry and... the whole... Rolling Stone topless thing."

"Why not? I think it's a brilliant idea," Doyle unexpectedly piped up. "Turnabout is fair play. I mean, that whole thing of Merry going topless in Rolling Stone... they don't ever make men do it. Unless it's like, Iggy Pop or someone, and hey, I like Iggy Pop. I think it would be kinda cool if we made a statement like that. About the whole topless thing. Why would it be absurd for us to go topless for KROQ, if a music magazine like Rolling Stone will push Merry into going topless for them?"

I was staring at Doyle, wondering when the hell he had suddenly picked up these weird feminist ideas, when Dieter interrupted. "Wait, there's topless photos of Merry in Rolling Stone? Can I see?"

"No!" I snapped.

"Fine, I'll just go to the corner store and pick it up..."

"Are _you_ going to get your chest out?" I asked him accusingly, stepping between him and the door.

Dieter glanced down at a photo of Martin Gore, his nipples peaking out from behind weird, strappy bondage gear, then shrugged. "I don't see why not."

Getting no backup from my other bandmates, I turned to Dick, who was clearly wavering. "On one level, no one wants to see my hairy-ass gorilla chest. But on another level, Doyle is right. I'm kinda annoyed on Merry's behalf. Why do they make her get her tits out to get in Rolling Stone, when they don't make us do it? Besides, if nothing else, it will be fucking funny. People will remember it. I think it's important to be memorable."

"Come on, Dan," Doyle teased, smirking so that I knew he was taking the piss out of me. "You were the one who was so keen on doing some promotional tie-ins with KROQ. Well, here's our chance. You can't say no to a deal like this, _hot damn_."

And so, yet again, I found myself outvoted. Amanda and Tammy appeared from Publicity, and looked over Dieter and Doyle with the coolly appraising eyes of cattle buyers, raising their eyebrows and exchanging glances at what they saw. A photographer and a studio were found and booked for the next morning. No time to prepare, no time to go home and hopelessly pump iron for 20 minutes to try and pretend I didn't have a pigeon chest and arms like matchsticks above my gangling guitar player's wrists. This was not fair, I thought to myself as I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in one of the hallway mirrors.

And Jesus Christ, my hair! It was a mess, the Morrissey quiff long grown out, my uncontrollable curls flopping about my head like a wilted pineapple in the California heat. But at least there was something I could do about my fucking hair, as I asked around for a decent barber and much to my relief, the very stylish receptionist at our hotel said he had a friend who did hair and make-up for films and music videos and could help me out, and even come to the hotel early the next morning.

Katy sat me down in front of the mirror in my hotel room and grabbed fistfuls of my hair, pulling it this way and that before just saying "Wow."

"Yeah, I'm sorry, it's a mess. I have the worst hair in the world, and the last guy I went to was back in England, and he was _terrible_..." I found myself apologising, wincing as I remembered the misguided Mancunian quiff of the previous spring. I had just spent six months trying to grow that mess out!

"Dude, you have beautiful hair," Katy drawled, in that laid back So-Cal accent. "It's sooo thick, amazing volume, but if you want to wear it this long, I'm going to have to take out a lot of the bulk underneath. Then it'll be easier to straighten."

"If you can get my hair straight, without losing the length... I would be so grateful." I felt the whisper of a ghost as I asked, remembering that it was Merry who had always liked my hair long. Katy nodded, stuck my forelock up with pins, then got to work on the back of my head. Feeling her strong fingers moving my head about, I felt lulled by the steady snip, snip, snip of her scissors as curls fell around my shoulders.

She cut my hair beautifully, the best haircut I had ever had in my life, then straightened it with tongs, and in the dry Californian desert air, it actually stayed straight. But as I admired my bonce in the mirror, she frowned at my face, turning it first one way then the other. "Your sideburns..." she ventured.

"I am not losing my muttonchops," I insisted, raising my hands to my face to cover them. Again, it was the memory of how much Merry had loved them that made me defensive. "They're kind of my trademark _look_."

"I don't want you to lose them, but I do think you should trim them a bit. You've got such wide cheekbones, you really want your facial hair to accentuate your cheekbones, not hide them." Putting her hands to my face, she held a couple of fingers over my jawline to show where she wanted to trim. "Trust me on this..."

I stared at my hair - which really did look the best it had ever looked - then risked a quick nod, reminding myself that I was lucky in that my beard really did grow back quite fast. My body might not be masculinely hairy, but my face sure was. If I didn't shave daily, I had scruff in a matter of hours.

Turning me around in my chair, she dug in her bag of kit for an electric razor, then slowly, carefully, went to work on my face, even as I closed my eyes so I wouldn't have to see the damage being done to my muttonchops. After an agonising ten minutes, during which I could see her checking to make sure they were symmetrical, she finally let me turn back to the mirror, and I was astonished at the handsome man that stared back at me.

"Wow," I said quietly, putting my hands to my face. "I have cheekbones." And all along, I'd thought Doyle and Dieter had the monopoly on facial structure.

"See, I told you. You have really great cheekbones, actually. There's a good-looking guy under all that fuzz." She brushed hairs from my shirt, then prodded at my face. "Follow the line of your cheek, here, not the line of your jaw."

I paid her by cheque, wincing at how many per diems that would have been, then wondered if I could claim it back as a promotional expense. When she was gone, I rushed back to the mirror and tried my new hair with my suit. Fuck yeah, I looked great, less like a 70s Get Carter style enforcer, and more like a proper 1966 mod, if only I could do the photo shoot fully clothed. But as I peeled off my shirt and tie to check out my physique, praying that I'd grown more muscles, or at least chest hair, or _something_ overnight, my heart sank. I still had the chest of a schoolboy, I thought to myself, as I bulked up with an extra jumper I really didn't need in the LA weather, and headed out to the cab to meet my bandmates and ride over to the shoot.

I hung back in the dressing room, fussing with my new hair as my bandmates disrobed. For Doyle, it was clearly no problem, he pulled off his shirt and flexed his lithe swimmer's arms, his chest lightly dusted with tiny golden hairs, bronzed during the band's week in LA by sun and salt water. He had a tattoo on one breast, and I leaned in to read it - "Sailor to the Sea" it declared, the words wrapped around a drawing of a mermaid with a mermaid with long, blonde hair.

"How long have you had that?" I wondered aloud, suddenly afraid what it might signify.

"Years," replied Doyle. "It's kind of my motto - the song's about the tattoo, rather than the other way around. In case you were wondering. Though... you're supposed to get tattoos to commemorate the important events in your life, so I probably should have got one to memorialise our first single."

"Do you have any tattoos, Dieter?" I wondered. Dick's full sleeve rockabilly tattoos showed around his wrists even when he wore a dress shirt, so I was afraid for a moment that I was the only _uncool_ member of the band without any ink.

"Fuck no," snorted Dieter.

"What do you mean, fuck no?" bristled Dick, flexing his arms so the elephants on his biceps seemed to charge.

"I'm Jewish? Can't be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have tats?" Dieter spoke this with an utterly patronising tone, like hey, as if it was so fucking obvious, that a guy who walked around wearing nazi uniforms onstage and giving interviews about Triumph of the Will aspired to be buried in a Jewish cemetery.

Dieter removed his shirt more slowly, sliding his tie from around his neck first, like a strip tease. He always acted up when the photographer was female, thrusting out his hips even when the camera wasn't on him. I surreptitiously compared our bodies, knowing that Dieter was considered to be the sex symbol in our band, and was surprised to discover that Dieter was actually as skinny as I was. It was only his great height, and the breadth of his shoulders that stopped him from looking scrawny. But then I noticed with a shock that both Dieter's nipples were pierced, with small silver hoops, and quickly averted my eyes. He had not had those when we were still rooming together at NYU.

But Doyle and Dieter were very obviously checking each other out. "Dude..." ventured Doyle. "Do you wax?"

"Fuck off," snapped Dieter, unamused.

"No, I'm serious. Because a lot of pro swimmers do, and I was wondering, since your arms are quite hairy, but your chest is smooth... does it reduce drag, or water resistance..."

"Alright, I wax," Dieter admitted testily. "It's got nothing to do with water resistance, though."

"Hey man, I was just asking..." Doyle was all innocence, but Dick hooted with laughter.

"Ouch, I cannot even imagine how much that hurts," Dick observed, and I turned to see that he was, indeed, as hairy as a gorilla, very masculine, very macho, but with a tiny gut that had to be sucked in to match the impressive musculature of his drummer's shoulders.

And then I realised they were all looking at me, feeling very self conscious in my suit, surrounded by half-naked men. The room suddenly had a rather locker room vibe I wasn't sure I liked, but nevertheless, I finally turned around and slipped my clothes off. It was funny how Merry was the only person I'd never felt self-conscious undressing in front of. There was just something about the way that she had looked at me that made me feel about six inches taller and twenty pounds more muscular. But standing with my bandmates, I felt decidedly short, and skinny, and weirdly hairless, though really, it could have been worse, my torso could have been as freckled with moles and birthmarks as Doyle's was. I crossed my arms in front of my chest to hide my nipples, in a subconscious echo of Merry's pose, then we were ready.

It was almost a laugh, actually. The photographer managed to put us at ease, and it was such an inherently ridiculous situation that it was hard not to treat it as a joke. I even stopped feeling self conscious, and actually started to feel slightly sexy and powerful, flirting with the camera from under my eyelashes. OK, it helped that the photographer was a woman, and when she told us we were looking good, the expression of interest on Mona's face, out behind the lights, made me actually believe it. And I wondered if this was what Merry had ever felt, either as a stripper, or as a model, this sense of power, of being able to command another person's gaze. It was weird, but... not weird in the ways I'd thought. It was like the opposite of having my Italian suit fitted, feeling on display and knowing that the photographer ultimately held the control in the situation, but at the same time, getting this blowback of validation when she told us we were gorgeous and we were really working it, watching the way the camera lens followed us. I could see how the feeling could be oddly addictive, and yet soul-destroying, though I never quite got the confidence to uncross my folded arms.

As we headed back to KROQ's Burbank offices, I felt very strange and very small, flipping through the copy of Rolling Stone to read the interview again and again. Only one boy had ever made Merry lose her cool? Was that me? I supposed I'd never know.

KROQ, good to their word, featured us in an on-air interview promoting our second, bigger LA show, interspersed with cuts from the album and a few live tracks that we had recorded for them earlier. Dieter flirted shamelessly with the DJ doing the interview, offering to show her his nipple rings, after we'd all started joking about how the shirtless photo shoot went.

"Shall I show you?" he offered, bending down to the mic to whisper in a low voice. "I'm unbuttoning my shirt now..."

"He really is, too, I wish this were television," laughed our radio host. "Oh my god, those are... they've got, like, little barbells on the end."

"They're weighted," Dieter explained mysteriously, flicking them with his fingertips.

"I wish you guys could see this. We've got Metropolis, live on the air, and Dieter, the bass player, has already got his shirt off. If you girls could see me now, you'd be so jealous! Well, I suppose you will see this for yourselves when our _Pick Up Metropolis on KROQ_ billboards go live in a few weeks..."

"You can see them for yourself tonight, if you want to come down to the Rainbow Room on the Sunset Strip. Myself and Lemmy, of the incomparable Motorhead, have exciting plans to compare bass-playing tips, historical memorabilia, and maybe check out some of the strippers. If you want to see my nipple rings, just come over and ask me."

Doyle rolled his eyes, intensely irritated, but said nothing, while I just kind of looked back and forth between them with a stunned smile on my face, trying to work out if he was serious or not, before gently steering the conversation back to our music.

He was dead serious, we found out when we got back to our hotel. Both Doyle and I declined to come along, Doyle because he hated Motorhead, and myself because I needed to stay up and ring our UK booking agent after midnight - 9am UK time - to confirm final plans for our next tour. Dick went along for the first round or two of drinks, mostly out of curiosity to meet Lemmy, as he was a massive Motorhead fan. (So all along, maybe Sergei had been right about the secret metalhead thing?) But Dick returned about 2 hours later, shaking his head, saying that Lemmy was a trip, and a complete gentleman, but that Dieter was fucking nuts. The evening had degenerated after a few lines of coke and a steady parade of scantily clad young women interested in seeing Dieter's nipples, so as an almost-married man, Dick had left, and sharpish. At dawn the next morning, Dieter finally returned, dropped off by a limo, covered in mysterious bruises and with angry welts around both his wrists, but with a huge grin plastered across his face, though he would not discuss any further details.

The weird thing, though, was that none of these episodes seemed to dent Dieter's success with women. In fact, the more stories that got reported in the press of Dieter being a playboy or a ladies' man or a general cad and rakehell, the more women seemed to throw themselves at him. It wasn't just Dieter sidling up to women to suggest an interlude of casual groupie-sex back at the hotel any more; it was now women, especially _young_ women, sidling up to Dieter and blatantly suggesting things they might want done to them. Like, seriously, did they not read the newspapers and the gossip columns and Public NME, did they just not even know what Dieter _was_? Yet still, the young women came, turning up backstage, or even waiting out by our tour van, desperate to be chosen to be the one to live out his debauched fantasies that night.

That picture, though, would come to haunt us. When we agreed to it, we thought it was just going to be a local thing, a couple of billboards up in LA, advertising KROQ. A couple of weeks of laughter, and then it would some other rock band's faces advertising the morning show. What we didn't count on was the internet. Sure, I didn't know much about the Internet in those days - to me, it was still that weird computer thing that my sister was really into.

And it was actually my sister that told me that the photo had taken on a second life on the internet, because she was on Metropolist, the internet fan club, and she heard all the gossip straight from Sandra or the Becks. Someone in LA had got a really good quality shot of the billboard with a telephoto lens. Within weeks, the thing was all over the web. I mean, my sister was teasing when I phoned her, saying "Come on, Danny, I have waited how many years to see a shirtless beefcake shot of Doyle Saunders, and I gotta get it off the Internet instead of off you?"

It took me a minute to even work out what she was talking about. "Oh, Christ. Is this about that KROQ ad? How the heck did you even find out about that?"

"Danny, everyone's seen it. It's been all over alt.music.alternative! The thing has totally gone viral, there's parodies of it and everything."

"What does that even mean, _gone viral_?" I asked, confused. I didn't particularly like the sound of it, remembering Dieter's run-ins with social diseases.

"It just means people love it, and they're sharing it like crazy. It could be, like, the new Dancing Baby. Hey, Sandra gave me an admin account so I could add old photos of you guys... let me just check the pageviews of the image hosted on their website..." There was the vague sound of typing in the background. 

"What kind of old band photos are you uploading to the web? I'm not sure I like the sound of that..." I hedged. But Pris's voice, when she came back on the line, was startled.

"Danny, you know, this thing has been viewed nearly 200,000 times. Your nipples are pretty popular."

"What?" I exploded, feeling my face burning with shame. 200,000 people had seen my bare pigeon chest and matchstick arms? I wasn't sure I liked the Internet. But then that figure struck me. "Two hundred thousand? For real? Holy shit, if only we could get all those people to buy Metropolis records."

 200,000 records - that was a Gold Record, at least in the UK. Our album hadn't gone Gold, yet. (Though, even before KROQ added us to the heavy rotation playlist, it had sold over 50,000 copies so far - almost unheard of for a scrappy little garage-rock band on an indie label.) It was Deltawave that was selling Gold and Platinum records that year, not us.

And it was that autumn that Deltawave finally got to number one on both the US and UK charts, with their third single, _Deeper Than Dreaming_. It was a classic, light-hearted, summery love song, driven by a Farfisa organ supporting Merry's breathless, almost orgasmic vocals. It wasn't a song I would have picked for a single. The repeated vocal hook - 'I can dream about you, you know, but your love goes deeper than dreaming, deeper than dreaming' - reminded me just a bit too much of Blondie's _Dreaming_ , though Merry and Elisha always did a cute call and response thing on that bit when they played it live that always got the audience jumping and singing along. But the track turned out to be a slow burner, and a total earworm, the kind of song I heard cabbies whistling on the taxi ride to yet another venue.

The nudie Rolling Stone photos had certainly helped their exposure, as had a headlining tour of their own, of large theatres in the US - Roseland, The Electric Factory - the sort of massive halls that Metropolis aspired to, but still could not hope to fill on our own. Finally, _Deeper Than Dreaming_ featured on the soundtrack at the crucial moment of the sleeper feel-good movie hit of the summer. The video followed me everywhere for the rest of the year, Deltawave all dressed up in cute black and white mod suits, playing a new wave band in the back of CBGBs, interspersed with cuts of the two romantic leads from the film chasing each other quirkily round hipster New York neighbourhoods. The film's unexpected success was the final push from top 5 to number 1. A number one record. Deltawave had finally cracked it, and I imagined Merry must have been so delighted - I could just imagine the excitement and jubilation there would be around the Windlass office, with Bebe and Harvey cracking out the bottles of champagne as they shouted their congratulations down a conference call to the band - but I never got to share that joy with her.

I watched her being interviewed, on Dane Dash's video request show on MTV, while we were sitting in a truckstop diner, waiting for the drive to Detroit or Duluth or whatever city was next in our endless schedule. They showed videos of them performing live on the Pyramid stage at Glasto. Heck, I hadn't even realised they'd played Glastonbury - nice of the fucking Rocket Pops not to bother telling me. So close and yet so far, as we'd played the New Bands Tent on the Friday, but they had been way up the bill on the Pyramid Stage on Sunday. Even with the sound turned down, her charisma and irrepressible energy came through, her smile so devastatingly adorable and mischievous. The whole band were dressed like they had been in the _Deeper Than Dreaming_ video, in tight black suits and skinny ties, but Merry in drag looked like an absolute dream. I knew it wasn't the suit she'd first accosted me in, outside the Pink Pony, it was a beautifully cut Firbank line that my sister said was all over Fifth Avenue now, but it still reminded me so much of our first meeting that it almost hurt to watch her. She had a glass of champagne in one hand and the microphone in the other, smiling at Dane Dash and flicking her long hair out of her eyes as she laughed at something that Gabe said. I didn't even need to hear her to know what that laugh sounded like; I still heard it in my dreams all the time.

That whole long, exhausting autumn that they topped the charts, Merry's voice followed me everywhere, and just obliterated all thoughts I might ever have had of meeting someone new among the beautiful girls that swirled around the band during our second European tour. And European girls were beautiful, oh good god, Italian girls, especially, were beautiful, and I even got off with one or two of them, barely believing my luck that these impossibly good looking women would actually let me touch them. The trick, I learned, to not feeling guilty about having sex with strangers, was just to drink, so I drank my fill of heady Italian wines before giving head to gorgeous Italian girls. Not so drunk that I couldn't _perform_ , mind you, but drunk enough not to feel the wave of self loathing, and drunk enough to just pass out rather than face the awkwardness afterwards. (God, booze could be a blessing to an insomniac like me, that way.) And the hangovers in the morning, my wretched eyes shielded behind silvered aviators, provided a cover for a multitude of socially awkward sins.

But Sweden proved my undoing, and Sweden made me cry, all those tall, leggy, icy blondes that reminded me so much of Merry with their apple-cheeked, grinning faces. Some of them tried to tempt me off to visit a sauna with them, with all the sexy Scandinavian shenanigans that seemed to imply; I just couldn't bring myself to do it. The tiniest thing would put me off: Merry's face on a poster or a magazine cover; Merry's voice on the radio; Merry dancing and playing bass in that omnipresent video, her slim hips in that black suit. Everyone else enjoyed Sweden. Dieter had a fucking ball. Doyle even acquired a Swedish girlfriend, for a few months - Effie was long gone after the madness of the past year - and Jenny accompanied the band throughout Europe, before being left like luggage at Heathrow on our final flight home.

Then we were back to the US for the winter, and a two-month tour of college towns now that Universities were in session, though the venues - mid sized places - were not as impressive as what Deltawave were now commanding. Deltawave, I heard through the grapevine, now rated their own, private full tour-bus with amenities. But Metropolis, even on that tour, were still in a van, though it was a newer, nicer van with tinted windows and a separate compartment at the back for our gear so no one had to balance on top of guitar amps.

With the added lift in sales that the KROQ exposure had brought us, we were finally making enough money to hire a driver/roadie/whatever, so all of us could drink or sleep or not worry about driving after gigs. Simon, a bit of a boy racer who seemed to genuinely _love_ driving the way I loved playing guitar, also humped our gear and even helped set up our amps for us - and when we discovered that he used to do sound at Brownie's, we promoted him to official soundman. Turned out, he enjoyed doing sound even more than he enjoyed driving, and wow, was it ever a relief to look out at the sound desk, and see a familiar face out there, who didn't balk when I asked for more of Doyle in the mix, or to roll off the high-end on the bass in my monitor, please?

I was growing in confidence as a performer, but also as a touring musician. I was starting to feel like an old hand, greeting the same radio faces and music journalists with the enthusiasm of an old friend. I always remembered what Jeanette from Mexican Summers had taught me - be nice to people when you're going up, because you will meet the same people on the way down. Not that I had any intention of ever coming down again. This was going to be my life from now on, I was resolved of that. And with our third single, P.U.A., still on heavy rotation on KROQ, and consequently bobbing around the top ten of the Billboard Modern Rock charts, I was certain I was never going back to the office life again.


	23. She's In Parties

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel and Metropolis finally limp back to NYC after nearly a year away, and find that now it's their turn to no longer quite fit into the life that they left behind.
> 
> And what do you call a musician without a girlfriend? _Homeless_.
> 
> Content warning for hipster racism (well, no; really just old fashioned racism in a vintage dress), references to suicide and heroin abuse.

Finally, after over 9 months solid on the road - enough time to have a baby, though unfortunately in my case, that baby was plastic and CD-shaped - we limped back to NYC for a glorious month and a half off over Christmas and New Year.

But the biggest and most immediate problem was a lack of anywhere to live. In the interim, every single one of us had lost our homes. What do you call a musician without a girlfriend? Homeless. Dick came home to find that Jessica had given up waiting for him, and had taken up with a nice Polish boy with a job in IT. Although she'd been nice enough to keep his stuff for him, the relationship and the cohabitation was over. So Dick said, y'know, fuck this, and went home to Dallas for Christmas. Since Doyle had broken up with Effie and Dieter had never had any use for a steady girl to cramp his style, the pair of them had ended up getting an apartment together down on Delancey, during one of our flying visits back during the summer.

It was a nice apartment building with high ceilings and pretty bottle green tiles on the corridor walls, that they christened "Fancy Delancey", since it was way nicer than the ramshackle tenements that surrounded it. Mostly, the building had been full of young Dominican families, and Doyle had actually had to sweet-talk the superintendent into letting them have the place at all, flexing the fluent Spanish he'd honed on our recent Mexican tour, and flashing his perfect teeth.

"No musicians, no NYU students," the superintendent had insisted.

"I understand why no musicians," Doyle had argued. "But we're signed, we're successful, we have the money, and I can give you 6 months rent in advance as a deposit. But why no NYU students?"

"NYU students worse than rats," the super had spat. "They bring drugs, and worse, they bring gentrification. Their parents buy the apartments out from under us, turn the buildings into co-ops. No more Dominicans."

But Metropolis' cheque, and more importantly, Doyle's willingness to sit on the front stoop and practice his Spanish while he played with the super's kids, finally swayed the man. Before we'd left for that last autumn tour, Doyle and Dieter moved into the 3-bedroom flat, which steadily degenerated into a den of sin and abject vice. I avoided it the best I could.

But, at the start of December, when I rang Marge to enquire whether she wanted to carry on subletting my apartment, or if I could have it back at the end of the year, I discovered that she had been rumbled by the landlord for an illegal sublet. Instead of throwing her out, the landlord had re-negotiated a slightly higher rent, but I was out of the loop and homeless. Doyle offered me the third room at Fancy Delancey, but the idea of spending any more time with him and Dieter gave me the creeps, so I limped back to the tiny spare room at my sister's, inconvenient though that now was, as she'd moved a computer in there and was treating it as both home office and server room.

Pricilla was nice about it at first, but after a few too many awkward awakenings caused by the disparity between her working hours, and my jet-lagged schedule, she sat me down and told me "Look, Danny, I love you, but you have either got to get your own place, or go stay with our parents."

For a split second, I actually considered it, that grand, old, pre-war apartment on Central Park West with its high ceilings and rude doormen, but then I shuddered. "No way. But ugh... How am I going to afford a place now? Especially if I'll just have to sub-let it again in a month?" We had actually managed to put aside quite a substantial sum of cash over the summer, thanks to merchandising and T-shirt sales - which we had split four ways equitably - but even Doyle's and Dieter's shares pooled together had been enough to cover the deposit on a three-bed on the Lower East Side, and no more.

"Oh, by the way, this came for you." She handed me a brown window envelope with a computer generated address that looked serious, though it had a Musketeer logo on the top.

I opened it, then whistled. It was a cheque, a royalty cheque, with a note from Gerry saying he didn't have a current address for Dick, but please could I ask him to get in touch so he could forward the last of the four cheques. That was one thing we'd agreed on, before we'd even had royalties to fight over. Metropolis would split our earnings four ways, both sales and publishing. Never mind that I wrote most of the music and Doyle wrote most of the lyrics; I knew from years of reading the music press on acrimonious splits from The Smiths to The Jam, that if you wanted to keep your rhythm section, you made them equal partners. 

Good old Gerry, he had not been kidding around with his equitable split thing. Turning the cheque over and over in my hands, I stared at the five figure total. As the monetary representation of a year of non-stop work, working 70 plus hours a week, it wasn't even minimum wage, not even close. But doing the sums in my head with an accountant's alacrity - knowing this was only a quarter of the band's share, which was half the net profits, after recouping - I compared it with a Windlass band's average haul after recoup, and started to laugh. I would never be _rich_ , but, y'know - whether it was down to KROQ's heavy rotation, or Doyle's nipples, we had somehow managed to sell well over 150,000 copies of our debut album in the past year.

But that was the other massive difference between Musketeer and Windlass - Musketeer had _paid_ us, and promptly. I knew, from working in the accounting department of Windlass, exactly how long it took payments to bands to filter down through DGI's impossibly complex tax system to the actual musicians. While Gerry, it looked like, did his accounts on the 1st of December on the dot and paid us as soon as the cheques from the distributors came in. I turned it back over to stare at my name in the "pay to the order of" section, then counted the 0's again.

"God, I just wish Dad could see this." I felt utterly vindicated, for the first time in my life.

"You could always... show it to him at dinner on Friday?"

"Dinner? On Friday... noooo," I moaned, slumping in my seat as my sister nodded.

"Come on, Danny. It's only one evening - because lord knows you won't turn up Christmas, will you? They're probably going to treat it as your birthday party, since you were away." Reaching over, she patted my hand compassionately.

My 26th birthday... I couldn't even remember where I'd celebrated it, a full year on from that fateful 25th that I had announced that I would not quit the music industry. Well, I had certainly shown them. "Alright, but only for you, Pris."

As usual, it was at The 21 Club, and as usual the waiters made a fuss over Mr Asheton Sr, and chucked Daniel Jr under the chin, as if I were still 12 years old. But after the usual enquiries, over drinks and then appetisers, about my parents' health and the family and the business and the state of the markets, I produced the cheque from Musketeer and handed it across the table.

"Why Daniel, what's this? A gift? But we've not given you your birthday present yet," my father teased dryly. I just rolled my eyes and gestured for him to look at it. The look of surprise on my father's face was worth everything, worth every late night, every terrible gig, every piss-stinking rehearsal space, every bone-shaking minute of sleep caught in that tour van. Daniel Sr pushed his spectacles up his long, crooked nose, blinked at the cheque as if expecting it to vanish, then smiled, handing it back to me. "And you made this from _music_?"

I nodded proudly, ignoring my sister as she dug me in the ribs. "We did."

"Well, congratulations." Casting his eyes about, Daniel Sr waved his hand discreetly for the waiter. "Garçon, please may we have our champagne now? It appears a toast is necessary. My youngest is now a pop star, it seems." The champagne was produced, popped and poured, and Asheton Sr proposed a toast. "To Metropolis. I'm proud of you, son."

It was the best glass of champagne I had ever tasted in my life, as I smiled and flushed slightly at my father's obvious pride.

"And now for your birthday present. I talked this over with your mother, and we agreed." He turned to her, and my mother beamed silently over her lamb cutlets. All of my shyness, I knew, came from my mother, along with that musical bent inherited from unknown Welsh ancestors. "It's not seemly for a boy your age to be living with his sister. Now, I have a business associate, who recently offered me a piece of real estate you might be interested in... He owns a warehouse just North of Canal Street which has recently been re-zoned from light industrial to residential. He was saving the top floor for a loft for his son - schoolmate of yours, if I recall correctly, Blandford, was it? - but said son is now moving to LA, so it's mine, or rather, ours, for a song. It's too good an investment to pass up. So I thought we'd go and look at it tomorrow afternoon, and if you like it, well, your mother and I will put down the deposit, and you can do your best keep up the mortgage. Though by the looks of that cheque, you won't be turning to us to make up any shortfalls, now will you, Danny?"

 

The next morning, I wandered around in a sort of daze, grinning from ear to ear as I checked out the loft. It was very bare bones in its current state, no fittings, no kitchen and barely a bathroom with a disgusting stand-up shower squeezed in behind the toilet. But it had beautiful old-fashioned iron posts supporting the walls, and a wall of glass on two sides, looking out across Broome Street on one end, and down to the World Trade Centre on the other. The location - Jesus fucking Christ, the location was to die for, right in the heart of everything. And best of all, it had an elevator. A clanking, old fashioned freight elevator that so scared the bejesus out of me that I would probably end up walking up the stairs anyway if I were drunk, but I need never carry a Fender Twin or a kick drum up five flights of stairs ever again in my life.

My father fussed over the contracts and the mortgage as Pris walked about peering at the 'potentialities'. "You jammy bastard," she accused, with a grin, even though our father had also provided the down payment for her own apartment. "I have a designer friend who can sort this out for you, of course. Put in a very minimal kitchen, all brushed steel, at the back. Leave the walls exposed like this, very, very chic... are you going to carve off a bedroom in the front or the back?"

I shook my head, standing in front of the window, grinning down at the street far below. "Neither; totally open plan all the way." I turned to my father. "When can I move in?"

Asheton Sr made a few phone calls, then grinned at me, and I realised exactly where I got my intense eyes and feline smile from. If my competitiveness came out in chart battles, his came out in real estate deals. "Whenever you like. Lannings wants a quick exchange, so if we sign first thing Monday morning, you can move in as soon as you're ready - though I expect you'll want to sort out the fixtures a bit first?"

I shook my head, still walking back and forth between the giant windows. I was in love with the apartment, dizzy with happiness and wanting to be back downtown. "I'll move in as is. I'll only be off on tour again in a month. I'll camp out until then while I make up my mind what I want to do with the space."

The rest of Metropolis were green with envy when they saw it, as I'd persuaded Doyle to drive my record collection and minimal furniture down from uptown, and Dieter had come along for the ride, even though carrying boxes was beneath him. He "watched the van" until everything was unloaded into the freight elevator, then rode up for the promised pizza and beer party. Depending on who was living downstairs, we might even be able to rehearse here, but Christ, we'd need some proper heating first. We drove back down to buy as small electric heater at a wholesale shop on Canal Street, and the three of us hovered around it the rest of the evening, eating, drinking and laughing at my good fortune.

\----------

 

December meant one thing in New York, and that was parties. Charlene threw a massive Christmas party at the Lacuna Lounge, then there was a Hanukkah party at Musketeer Records, with Gerry toasting our shared good fortune and calling Metropolis the best decision he'd ever made. Even our distributor had sent over a bottle of champagne to celebrate a bumper year! I held a small wine and cheese party for my sister and a few select friends, up at the loft, huddling round the makeshift kitchen that was slowly growing out of the bare brick wall, but I spent most of the evening cockblocking Doyle and my sister's limp attempts at flirting. I knew Doyle wasn't after a girlfriend, he was just after a place to stay where Dieter didn't hog the bathroom for hours every morning.

On one level, it was amazing, coming home as conquering heroes, having finally made good on all the promises we had drunkenly made to NME writers in the front booth of the Lacuna Lounge. Getting free drinks and guest list spots to any gig on the Lower East Side, that was pretty sweet, I could get used to that. And yet, our success had subtly changed things, changed the way our friends treated us in ways that were silly, yet hard to shake off. When I ran into Fab at a gig at Arlene's Grocery, we hugged like old friends, and Fab introduced me to Jules, the singer of his new band, The Stakes. But when I acted all enthusiastic, and asked for a demo, Fab suddenly went weirdly cold. "Yeah, I don't know that that's such a good idea," he hedged, exchanging awkward glances with Jules.

"Why not? It's only me! Hot damn, I've been into all of your bands, since high school, since the first time you played the fucking Spiral..."

"I dunno, man, it's just different. It's weird, I can't explain," Fab muttered into the round of drinks that I had bought them, then changed the subject abruptly. "You heard about Jeremy Kane, right?"

I'd been on tour for so long that at first, my memory just failed. "Jeremy... Oh man, is he still dating that hot mess, Kate Charms?"

"Do you not even know?" Fab looked at me like I was a complete fucking idiot. "He passed away."

"What?" I staggered back slightly, feeling like I had been punched in the stomach, as much at the idea of completely out of touch I was, as the news of an acquaintance's death. "When? How?"

"Heroin overdose," supplied Jules.

"Suicide," Fab countered. "They found a note, after he didn't turn up to the Leeds Festival."

"The Leeds Festival?" I stuttered. "We played Leeds the day before the Rocket Pops were due to go on, I didn't even see him... Fuck!" And suddenly, from the weird, slightly envious expressions on Fab and Jules' faces, I knew that was the wrong thing to have said. They thought I was just showing off, like, yeah, we've toured Europe and you haven't. I cast my mind back, trying to remember the last time I'd seen Jeremy. If memory served, we'd given him a ride to... I dunno, Glastonbury or somewhere, and yeah, I hadn't thought he'd looked great, but I'd assumed it was just all the fucking coke, or maybe one of those endless tour bugs we all suffered from, not... _heroin_. "I'm sorry," I backtracked. "I had no idea. Heroin? Jeremy was into smack? That shit is for washed-up grungers. Surely no one from _our_ scene would be dumb enough to get into smack."

Fab and Jules exchanged knowing looks, then Fab just shrugged. "You've been away a long time, Dan. Things have changed."

I sipped my drink and looked around Arlene Grocery, at the desperate dance of the wannabes and the almost-there's and the has-beens and decided that really, New York would never change that much. But as Fab and Jules started talking about the new, hip bands on the scene that I should go and check out - The Louche, The Follies, The Rent, and hey, I guess 'The' bands were back in fashion - I suddenly felt horribly, desperately out of touch.

Next, Dieter and Doyle had a weekend long party at their flat that reputedly sucked up all the drugs within a 10-block perimeter of the Lower East Side. I put in a brief appearance, and schmoozed with the scenesters, before being introduced to a wild-eyed man known as "PCPete", that Dieter claimed to have been in an industrial band with, just before joining Metropolis.

I didn't even know what it was about PCPete, but I just took an almost instant dislike to the guy, though I would be really hard-pressed to explain why. I mean, he was perfectly friendly, maybe even a bit over-friendly, because within 30 seconds of meeting him, he was offering me a line of coke. I said thanks, that was kind of him, but that wasn't really my thing, and almost immediately, he started rattling off "So what do you want, then, man? Pot? Speed? Acid? Ketamine? You name it, I'll ring Auntie Beast and get it for you, my man." And then he pounded me on the back in a really rather intimidatingly over-familiar way.

"No, really, that's OK," I insisted, trying to politely remove his arm from my shoulders. "I'm OK with my scotch here."

And then he launched into this long and detailed history of his former bands back in the 80s, and you know, they were pretty obscure but maybe I might have heard of them because they'd opened for Throbbing Gristle and Einsturzende Neubauten back in the day. I nodded politely, and waited for a break in the conversation to maybe change the subject to something I was more familiar with, but he was talking at speed in that weird, slightly defensive way that dudes get when they are quite obviously trying to impress you. And it wasn't like I wasn't willing to be impressed, but really, y'know, it was a party, and I was just there to relax and have fun.

Finally, at the end of this wall of speech, he took a breath and wound up by stating "Well, I'm between bands right now, but I've been doing a bit of scouting, a bit of A&R, a bit of management for other groups."

"Oh," I sighed, finally spying a way into this guy's conversational monolith. "You work in A&R? Who for? I still keep in touch with a lot of people from labels..."

PCPete looked slightly put out, eyeing me suspiciously, as if I were asking for state secrets instead of just trying to make small talk. "You know... Splatterblade Records. Pentamerous Comms Communications."

I shook my head and looked completely blank. "I don't think I know them. What kind of music is that?"

"Oh, you know," shrugged PCPete, taking a slightly supercilious tone. "Extreme Industrial, EBM, GoreCore..."

"I see," I said noncommittally, wondering how quickly I could edge out of the conversation without being rude.

"So you used to do A&R, didn't you?" he said sharply, his eyes glinting in that weird way I was starting to find disconcertingly familiar, that meant, because you are, well, _famous_ , the other person knows a hell of a lot more about you than you know about them, whether you want them to or not. "Maybe I could give you some tips, huh? Hahaha." He winked as if he were doing me the most enormous favour, introducing me to GoreCore bands.

"That's OK, I'm kind of out of that side of the game now."

"Ah, then maybe you could give _me_ some tips." Now that was a bit closer to the truth, I felt. These guys who pretended that they could do you favours, it was always all about the favours that they wanted you to do for them.

But at that moment, a girl, a good-looking brunette overdressed in a 1950s style ballgown, appeared and handed PCPete a fresh drink. I was grateful for the interruption and said hello, thinking maybe it was Pete's girlfriend, but almost immediately she started to completely ignore him, and attached herself to me, with that look in her eye I instantly understood to mean _OK, you are now clearly the most famous person in this room._ But she was very pretty, and I was slightly lonely and it was easier to sit on the windowsill of the kitchen and listen to this attractive young woman than try to make my way back through the sea of people all dressed like miniature versions of Dieter.

"So I live downstairs," the girl was shouting in my ear. "It's a pretty cool building, for the most part, ya know? So many people here work in media, lots of people working for start-ups, lots of people in bands, filmmakers, web designers. It's a rilly rilly hip, funky vibe. I love this neighbourhood!"

"Start-ups?" I said and started to sing. "What, like, you got to start me up, start me up, I'll never stop, never stop, never never never..." I stopped myself as I realised she hadn't a clue what I was singing about. I had got far, far too used to Merry's encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure Stones singles.

"Start-ups? Like, internet start-ups?" the girl chattered on. "New media."

I nodded vaguely and tried not to stare at the half-bare breasts she seemed to be trying to press into my face as we chatted. Web designers and new media people. I wondered what had happened to the Dominicans, while I'd been away.

"OK, the people on the ground floor, I don't know about _them_ , though. I think they're, like Mexican or something? They have, like, eight billion children, and they're always cooking this disgusting stinky food and the smell comes up the airshaft, ugh it's so gross... and they're so rude, you know? Like, we are trying to buy out the management of the building and organise a co-op, so I went down there to talk to them, coz they're the last hold-outs..." She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial tone and moved closer, her breasts bobbing in my face. "I think they got rent control back in the 80s? They'll never give that up. It's so disgusting how _cheap_ these people are!"

I pulled away, wondering how far I could lean back before I actually ended up on the fire escape. "I used to have a rent-controlled apartment on Ludlow St. It was pretty cheap, but on a musician's salary, I could still barely afford it. I don't know how families cope," I mumbled, but she didn't even seem to hear me.

"I don't even know what they're doing, cramming all those kids into apartments like this. And they're so rude! Totally rude. Like, this woman wouldn't even speak English to me, she just yammered at me in that weird language of theirs, and then slammed the door in my face. I've never been so insulted. They're cheap, they're dirty, they bring crime into the neighbourhood..."

"Spanish," I supplied. "They're Dominican, and they speak Spanish." I could still remember back when Dieter had got the shit beaten out of him, just down the road, by a gang of white power skinheads, but I didn't think this girl had even been living in New York back then. She wasn't even that attractive, come to think of it, blowing her cigarette smoke past my face, and the 1950s ballgown was ill-fitting, pinching her half-bare breasts unappealingly.

"New York is going to the dogs, y'know? I'm so fed up with it, the crime, the drugs, and it's so expensive! You don't even wanna know what I have to pay for a soy latte at the Pink Pony. I'm sick of it, I tell you, I might do something really crazy, something really drastic, like, y'know, I'm tempted to vote Republican in the next election?" She sniffled, and wiped her nose with the back of her hand and I could see the tell-tale dribble of mucus and white powder fuelling her incessant chatter. Crime and drugs, huh.

"Look, I'm really sorry, but I have to go," I told her politely but firmly, taking her by the elbows and physically moving her aside so I could rise. "I have to find Dieter to organise our next rehearsal..."

"Oh, are you in Dieter's band?" she gushed, her breasts bobbing again, as if trying to force me back into my seat. "I loooove Dieter's band... are you his drummer?"

I extricated myself from the conversation, then made a swift exit without even saying goodbye to Dieter or Doyle, both of whom were sitting in front of a coffeetable that was so covered in white powder it looked as if they were getting to bake a loaf of bread. If this was what parties were going to be like from now on, maybe I was getting too old for parties.

But the party invites rolled in, thicker than before. One of Dieter's friends invited the whole band to "Christmas Babylon", a Hollywood themed costume party in a warehouse in Brooklyn that Dieter insisted everyone would still be talking about for years to come. I wasn't entirely convinced, as Dieter was starting to pick up some seriously dodgy friends, but Doyle said the host - a music producer and DJ himself, and a bit of a fixture on the Lower East Side party scene - was actually sound, so I reluctantly agreed.

"Costume party, though," I sighed. "What are you two going as?"

"Not sure yet," Doyle mused. "Maybe James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, maybe Leo DiCaprio in Romeo and Juliet? If I could find some armour somewhere... How about you?"

I tried to think, but I'd missed so many films while we'd been on tour, my cultural references were completely out of date. "I dunno. Maybe Austin Powers? Is my costume allowed to be funny?"

"Well, it's supposed to be a _costume_ ," teased Dieter. "You dress like that every day, man."

"What are you going as, then?"

"Conrad Veidt in Casablanca." Deiter smiled wolfishly.

"What, a fucking Nazi? Like you said, it's supposed to be costume," I sighed, reaching over and smacking Dieter gently on the back of his half-shaved head.

"My stage costume is not Nazi, it's World War I," rabbitted Dieter, as Doyle, beside him, perfectly mimed the words along with him. Like an old married couple, they were starting to look alike, aping one another's mannerisms, either consciously or subconsciously.

After floating and rejecting several suggestions - Malcolm MacDowell in A Clockwork Orange? Played out. Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita"? _Costume_ , Daniel. Elliot Ness? Jean-Pierre Leaud in The 400 Blows? Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless? Daniel you're _really_ not getting this costume thing, are you? - I finally settled on Alain Delon in Girl On A Motorcycle. Dieter promised to lend me a pair of leather trousers (which had to be taken up considerably for my much shorter legs) and Doyle found me a black leather jacket. With a pair of vintage ray-bans, yeah, I thought I looked pretty cool. I blow-dried and ironed my hair straight and brushed it down, and yeah, I made a pretty good Alain Delon, actually. Convincing. Now if only I could find a teenage Nico to impregnate, ha ha... No, better not say that out loud or Dieter might take me at my word.

We gathered at Dieter and Doyle's apartment, then took the subway over together. I was actually shivering in my leathers, wishing I'd worn something heavier than a Breton fisherman's sweater underneath, but at least I wasn't wearing chain-mail. Doyle looked miserable, as he couldn't even wear a coat over the top, since the metal links would rip the fabric. Dieter, however, was snug in an ankle-length leather coat and a frightening looking SS cap, though we had put our collective feet down and insisted that he leave the fucking swastika off the armband. Really, there was a limit. But Dieter had already done a line of coke before leaving home, and he was impervious to criticism.

We stopped at a bar in Williamsburg for a drink before heading over, Dieter enjoying the confused and hostile stares from both women and men as I tried to warm up. After hitting a liquor store to pick up a bottle of vodka, we made our way over to the waterfront, locating a huge building that had once been a brewery, the top floor of which pulsed with light and noise audible from at least a block away. After climbing the stairs, Doyle clanged on the thick metal door with the side of his armoured shoulder-pad. A few minutes, and several repetitions of the summons later, the door slowly opened and swung back to reveal Z-Man from Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, tall and gaunt and impossibly glamourous, beaming at us, in a pink and gold brocade paisley suit and a pair of purple-tinted granny glasses, a thin golden crown pressed onto his mod-boy haircut.

"Herr Hitler!" he gasped, putting his hand over his mouth in faux outrage. "Willkommen, we've been expecting you!" He and Dieter exchanged air kisses on both cheeks, then Z-Man threaded his arm under Dieter's elbow and escorted us through. "And who are your adorably rough trade friends?"

"Not for you, Z-Man, not even bendable," Dieter giggled. "My guitarist, Alain Delon and my singer, Romeo Montague."

"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou _Romeo_ ," sighed Z-Man with a glance backwards over his shoulder as we walked through a grand, tiled entry hall. 

"A romeo by any other name would surely smell as sweet," completed Dieter. "And who am I to quibble semantics with old Will?"

"Dieter, my dear, I do believe you would quibble semantics with Derrida himself," drawled Z-Man, and Dieter swooned under the compliment. I started wondering if the drink was hitting me quicker than I had expected, as I could have sworn that one wall had the distinctive reflective glass of a recording studio control booth. "Never mind your pretty head about Derrida... we have girls for your hetero boys somewhere... so many girls. Williamsburg is positively crawling with girls tonight." He had a vague accent, possibly Southern. "I think we might even have a Girl On A Motorcycle for Alain somewhere."

Dieter threw a pitying glance back at me, over his shoulder. "Our Alain needs to get laid more than just about anything in the world, so if you have any girls willing to entertain uptight little Britishes boys, please, bring them on, and sharpish."

"Do I have girls for you..." With a dramatic flourish, Z-Man pulled aside a floor to ceiling curtain, and showed us through into a huge, barrel-vaulted hall, which throbbed with a churn of moving people. I didn't know where to look - lights, incense, music assaulted every sense. Bodies writhed under strobe lights, girls dancing on podiums - no, wait, those were huge, life sized marble statues draped with tinsel and psychedelic bikinis for the occasion. It was only the intensity of the strobes that made them seem alive. There were people everywhere, beautiful people, in every imaginable costume, some masked, some extravagantly made up, all of them unbelievably attractive. I felt my battered libido heaving to life, buoyed up by the heady swirl of heavy church incense, frankincense and myrrh, mixing with the stink of promised sin. At one end of the room there was a huge fountain flowing with something that looked alcoholic. At the other end was a small dais, like a stage, on which a string quartet comprised of winsome girls in Victorian corsets did battle with a turntablist who was cutting Jungle rhythms against them.

Everywhere, there was alcohol, and drugs of every sort imaginable. Someone pushed a glass into my hand, and Dieter sloshed a generous helping of vodka into it, then a joint wafted past my face. Well, alright, might as well, I thought to myself, took it and inhaled deeply. As I passed it on to Doyle, another, unlit, appeared in my hand, a gift from a smiling admirer. OK, then. I nodded my thanks and pocketed it for later. For now, I was quite high enough. The black lights seemed to make the paisley on Z-Man's jacket squirm and writhe. What was this music? It sounded so familiar. I realised with a start that the string quartet had launched into a weird disjointed version of Radioshack's _Reality Police_.

Z-Man threw his head back and howled with laughter. "It's my happening and it freaks me out," he quoted, before Dieter put one arm around his shoulders, and deployed an amyl popper into his face. "Don't write cheques your cock can't cash, Dieter!"

"I know you want to suck my cock. Maybe tonight I might let you. Everybody wants to suck my cock; I am related to Hitler after all," giggled Dieter and stumbled off to decant some of the wicked looking fountain punch into the glass on top of his vodka, stopping to let a couple of girls try on his SS hat along the way.

Doyle and I clung to one another as a troupe of pint-sized acrobats half-strolled, half-rolled by before disappearing under a long, draping tablecloth. "Are we tripping?" Doyle muttered into my ear.

"No, that definitely happened; I saw it too," I assured him, at least I thought it had. Were they children or midgets? Anything seemed possible at that party.

We pushed through the crowd, past the fountain, and on through the rest of the warehouse, each chamber of which had been lit in different coloured lights, and decorated with the motifs of different eras. A red-lit 1920s speakeasy filled with gangsters and molls gave way to a golden-orange Louis XIV salon, followed by a purple-blue medieval room with a four-poster bed, where Dieter was already being held captive by a pair of mermaids, pressing him down and teasing him with their bared breasts. A Victorian living room in an unearthly green hosted a tea party for a group of steam punks, some with tentacles emerging from odd places in their old-fashioned clothes. One of them offered me some tea, and I took a sip without even asking what it was. It tasted faintly of mushrooms, and jesus christ, I hoped they weren't psychedelic ones, as this night was strange enough already.

Then we moved through a set of billowing white curtains into a brightly lit cloister filled with perverted takes on Greek sculptures, with odd body modifications and oversized penises rendered in perfect white marble. A group of Greek nymphs danced lazily in a corner while a couple of fratboy looking types lounged about in togas. I was about to make some comment about _there goes the neighbourhood_ , when I recognised one. Blandford Lannings.

"Hey, man, I thought you moved to LA," I greeted him, as a couple of the Maenads wrapped a leopard print scarf around Doyle's neck and pulled him into their dance.

"Yeah, well, I'm back. LA's boring, man. Played out," Blandford shrugged, his eyes glazed.

"Yeah well, your loss is my gain. Your old man sold me your loft."

Blandford made a face that indicated that his boredom also encompassed lofts in lower Manhattan, then he propped himself up on one elbow and looked at me hopefully. "Got any dope, Dan?"

I dug in the pocket of my borrowed leather jacket, trying to work out where I'd stashed the joint, then produced it from my change pocket.

With a derisive snort, Blandford flopped back onto the couch. "Not that kind of dope, you moron." Rousing himself again, he bellowed at one of the girls Doyle was dancing with. "Auntie Beast, it's time for my medicine!"

As she peeled away from the group, bringing Doyle with her, I felt the strange woman throwing me an appraising glance. Despite her shapely body, her face was stunningly ugly, though so striking looking that she was almost attractive, but something about her instinctively felt _wrong_ to me as she looked me up and down. "For you, too, sweetie? Love the leathers. I shot up Lou himself, once."

I shook my head, and pulled away disgusted, as I realised they were about to do a smack deal, right there in the sculpture gallery. But suddenly Doyle was beside me, his eyes shining with a strange light. "I'm... interested?" he said slowly.

"Are you fucking _mad_?" I snapped, wondering if I should slap some sense into my friend.

"I've always been curious, I've always wanted to just try it. To know what it's like. Can't hurt to just try it once."

"That's the spirit," called Blandford from the couch.

"This is heroin," I warned. "There's no such thing as just _once_."

"That's bullshit," Auntie Beast shrugged, pulling out tin foil, a lighter, but thankfully no works. Well, at least they weren't going to fucking shoot up, right in the middle of a party. "I have loads of weekend users, darling. Chase the dragon for one or two days, and go away clean. So long as you remember to take a break every three days, you're golden."

"What about Jeremy Kane? Was he a weekend user?" I countered, feeling my face growing hot. Blandford looked away awkwardly, and a couple of the girls shifted uneasily. We had all known him.

"Jeremy Kane got stupid," Auntie Beast insisted, with a defiant little shrug. "The guy had a death wish after his girlfriend left him. If it hadn't have been heroin, it'd have been a shotgun."

Doyle wavered for a few moments, I could see doubt flicker across his face, but then he, too, shrugged. "Jeremy Kane was always dumb as a bag of hammers, he never knew when to give up. I'm not dumb. I know my limits. I just want to try it, to see what it's like."

"You want to try, sweetheart? It's up to you. But if it's your first hit, this one's on me." The woman held out a small plastic packet filled with something brown that looked like poorly refined sugar.

"You're fucking nuts if you do this," I insisted, backing swiftly away from them both, towards an exit sign I saw glowing at the far end of the room. 

I groped through the billowing curtains for the handle, then pushed myself through the opening as I heard Doyle behind me, saying, "Well, all right. Just the once."

Fresh air. Chilly at this altitude, but at least the sheltered balcony was out of the wind. It had been a long time since I'd felt this alone, felt this disconnected from my friends and bandmates, like I didn't even know who Doyle and Dieter were turning into any more. I mean, this was typical, wasn't it? This amazing party, with drugs of every kind just laid on, full of girls and boys and god knows what, like some massive orgy with tentacles and midgets and fountains of champagne, sex and drugs and rock'n'roll on tap, and here was me, the straight man, the _square_ , on my own again, feeling absolutely unable to let go and just give in to the hedonism of what was supposed to be my lifestyle. Was this what I'd traded my life, my job, my relationship for - shitty fucking _parties_?

And then, slowly, I realised I was not alone. Feminine laughter echoed from below. Turning around, I could see a stone staircase leading down a few steps, and at the bottom, two women were huddled in the lee of a giant marble winged angel of death, giggling and sharing a cigarette. One of them, dressed all in white, was dolled up like an angel herself, with a pair of wings perched demurely on her back. Too bad Romeo hadn't found Juliet, instead of Auntie Beast. The other woman was dressed all in black leather, in fact a leather catsuit with a big silver hoop attached to a zipper at her throat, and a chunky metal biker belt draped around her hips. Waist-length blonde hair completed the look, as I started to giggle at the coincidence of our costumes. 

"So here you are," I called out, trotting down the steps towards them, glad of the company. "Z-Man was right. Girl On A Motorcycle! Alain Delon meets Marianne Faithfull. I..." And my voice trailed off as the girl turned to face me. _I'll be kissing you in Paris_. "Merry."


	24. If You Want Me To Stay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Z-Man's Hollywood Babylon Christmas Party, where the rules of reality seem to have been suspended for one evening in Brooklyn. Doyle is experimenting, trying smack for the first time, while Dieter pushes his boundaries, exploring further into the world of BDSM. 
> 
> But Daniel... Daniel has unexpectedly run straight into the ex-girlfriend he very much still holds a torch for, and needs to confront the tangle of his emotions for her, and the ways in which both he - and Merry - have changed over their year apart. Does he still have a hope in hell of... _winning her back_?

As we faced each other across Z-man's balcony, conflicting emotions flickered across Merry's face in succession, too quick for me to make much sense of. Hurt. So much hurt - I hadn't expected that. But then again, I hadn't expected the pounding, almost painful sensation in my own chest, either, like I had just been punched in the solar plexus. Neither of us spoke. If she was experiencing anything like I was, neither of us _could_ speak. A year. How do you cope with a year's worth of emotions condensed down to fifteen seconds?

Then the other woman - and suddenly I recognised her as Cindy Birdweather - peeled away, looking first at me, then back at Merry, then back at me pointedly. "I'm going to go and... get a refill on our drinks. You two stay here and chat." She took my glass from me without so much a whisper of complaint.

"It's been a while," I finally forced myself to say, just staring at her. She'd cut bangs into her hair, blunt across the top of her eyes, which made her look somehow younger, and she was even thinner, which I knew was fashionable, but didn't really suit her. But otherwise, she looked exactly the same. Those impossibly long legs, wrapped in leather. Those magnificent breasts, her snub nose, her sparkling sea-green eyes. Except her eyes weren't sparkling with mischief, they were welling up with pain, like she was on the verge of tears, but holding it back - just.

"It has been a while," she agreed, and though she didn't take her eyes from me, I could see her gaze flickering down my body, taking in my longer hair, my thinner chest, birdlike under the leather jacket, the bulge in my trousers that Dieter had told me not to hide.

Suddenly I realised I was still wearing my ray-bans, and ripped them off, wincing at the suddenly too bright light of the street lamps, and saw her face come perfectly into focus. "Sorry - I should congratulate you, really."

"For what?" she blurted out, too fast for comfort.

"You went to number one. Dream come true. I'm glad it was you that did it first." Merry just rolled her eyes, and made a very _Merry_ face, half embarrassment, half sheepish pleasure. "So tell me, what's it like?"

"it's overrated," she tossed back.

"Overrated," I laughed. "That we could all have such overrated experiences every day."

"It doesn't mean anything," she shrugged, breaking off my gaze, and suddenly turning aside, grabbing onto the balcony railing and gazing off over the Manhattan skyline on the other side of the river. "You think it's going to change your life, going to number one. You think it's going to solve your problems, fix your broken heart, make everything better. But you're still the same old loser when it drops off the charts again, you, just a bit richer."

Fix your broken heart. I knew full well how having an album at number one on the CMJ chart could do nothing against a broken heart. "That B-side, though..."

She turned back towards me, and now her eyes were sparkling. I _really_ liked the bangs, I thought they made her look even more mischievous. "Did you like it?"

"A bit close to home," I told her, feeling ever so slightly defensive. "It's genuinely weird, seeing someone else's single with your name on it, everywhere you go."

"But that's kind of what it was about?"

"What?" I bristled momentarily.

"Sweetheart of the radio... that's what it felt like. Everywhere I went, your song followed me. _You_ weren't there, you, your body, even your sweet voice on the phone, had disappeared, vanished off on tour. I was alone, I had no sweetheart any more, just this guitar riff on the radio to constantly remind me of you. I wasn't your sweetheart, I was this radio single's sweetheart. Christ... _Rated Frustrated_. I had no idea what the meaning of that phrase truly was until I was hearing your song on the radio all the fucking time, but had no more _you_." 

"I..." Suddenly my mind reeled. I was so used to layers of allusion and metaphor in song lyrics. Could it possibly be that she had meant the song completely literally? 

"And to top it off, I get into LA to play this big party, celebrating our number one, congratulations, Merry, you're at the top now, and there's massive fucking naked photos of the ex that broke your heart all over the city... Oh man, were you just taking the piss out of me? You were even doing my pose, with the crossed arms and the tilted head, like I taught you from my days at Firbank!" She turned wounded eyes towards me.

"No," I insisted, suddenly realising that I might have got this whole thing very wrong. What if it hadn't been a kiss-off, but a cry for attention? "We did that photo shoot after you posed... naked for Rolling Stone. Like, what was that about, Merry? You did it first! We did our KROQ shoot as a commentary on that. Like you said to me once, why is it only women that have to strip off to make money? We did it as a commentary... as _criticism_ of the whole... _naked_... thing." And even as I was saying it, I was looking at her, and imagining her breasts, naked under leather.

Merry bit her lip resentfully, staring out across the rooftops again. "That whole fucking Rolling Stone thing..." Her voice sounded actually angry. "I had the fucking flu. I didn't go to the first interview because I was dying of flu, and we had a gig the next day, so I wanted to save my voice. And Rolling Stone started ringing up and threatening not to run the piece if they didn't get A _ccess To Merry_ , and all that shit, so Michael, he filled me full of heavy duty cough syrup, and he sent me down there, saying, whatever they want, you just fucking go along with it. I had a glass of wine, because I didn't realise it was _prescription_ cough syrup, the kind you're not supposed to drink with, and just... woo, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I didn't know where Gabe had got to, if they'd taken him off somewhere else. Couldn't you see it in the photos? My hair a mess, like I'd just got out of bed, completely fucking _trashed_? But no, they insist I do the shoot then and there, and pop your top off love. Woo! Well why not, cause I'm shitfaced. Got me to sign the release forms then and there, and then... Boom! You, naked, in Rolling fucking Stone. I was wearing jeans, you know, hip-hugger jeans with the top button unbuttoned like they asked, but they airbrushed the things right off my fucking hips. It's the kind of thing you'd have expected from Playboy, but... Fucking Rolling Stone? Just don't fucking talk to me about Rolling fucking Stone..."

As her voice trailed off, the door opened, and Cindy reappeared, bearing two glasses full of that lethal punch. "Here you go..." I accepted one gratefully, but Merry stared at it suspiciously. "I'm going to go and... dance for a bit," Cindy told Merry, rather meaningfully. "If you need me, hon, come and find me, OK?"

"I will." Merry nodded solemnly, though she still didn't taste the drink.

"I'm sorry about the Rolling Stone thing, I really didn't know. If I had, I wouldn't have..." I ventured.

"No, it's OK." Merry handwaved my apology away. "In fact, now I know the reason that you did that KROQ shoot, I'm fucking _glad_ you did it. That was a good statement to make. I guess I rubbed off on you a bit."

"More than a bit." I smiled, but omitted the bit about how it had been Doyle's idea, and I had very nearly nixed the whole thing. "Though really, I do not play guitar _that_ much like Dead Letters."

"Ha ha, I know. It was a joke, like, I was just trying to get your goat." She smiled her crooked grin. "I know it's dumb, but there were so many times I kept trying to send, like, secret messages to you, through interviews and stuff, because I knew Michael wouldn't allow me to talk about you. Even the video - the whole Francois Truffaut nouvelle vague rip-off, with me in a black suit, dressed just like you, did you not get that? I played Glastonbury wearing your _tie_ as some kind of good luck charm, hoping you'd come over and find me backstage after Phil Rocket Pop said he'd seen you there, but stupid me, you were long gone..."

"My Dior tie? Is _that_ where it went?" But suddenly, I was pissed off. "You know, Merry, did it never occur to you, that you could have called me? You knew what label we're on, you could have called Gerry, you could have got a message to our PR or our booking agent or even my damn sister, who could have put you through to me..." Even as I said it, I knew it was an impossible demand. I'd promised myself to try something like that, to track her down through Cindy, and found myself swept off on to another country and another tour.

But Merry's smile faded slowly, replaced by an expression of almost inexpressible sadness. "I knew, you needed to go off and do your thing. I knew you needed to go off and... prove yourself. Do you not remember how impossible things were at the end? How weird, how _jealous_ you were of me? I knew I needed to let you go. You needed to see what it was like for yourself. Even if it was the hardest thing I ever did, letting you go. Telling you to go, in fact. But you know what they say; if you love someone, set them free. I knew that spending all your energy looking after me and my band was holding you back. You were like a baby bird that needed a push out of the nest, I guess."

The look on her face almost broke my heart, as I grasped for words. "I..." She was right, of course she was right. Merry was always right; she knew me better than I knew myself. "I don't really know what to say except... I guess, thank you? Maybe you were right?" I felt my knees start to shake, and I took another deep draught of the punch to try to steady myself.

Her face clouded as she frowned. "Look, Danny, you might wanna watch it with that?" She pointed at the glass. 

I shook my head, looking at her with vague confusion. "Why?"

"It's almost certainly spiked."

Immediately, I put the glass down on the balcony railing. Recalling Auntie Beast and her brown powder, I wondered what the hell I had just put into myself, and for a moment I considered making myself sick over the balcony. "With what?"

"It's Will Zarnetski's idea of a joke. He puts ecstasy in things, thinks that it will loosen people up, make them have a better time at his parties, and you know, if it all turns into a giant orgy, that's just a bonus."

I stared at the drink, and was quite tempted to pick it up again. Ecstasy was supposed to make you feel good, happy, forget your broken heart, right? "Well, no wonder Dieter and Doyle are acting like two randy schoolboys tonight, then."

Merry suppressed a giggle. "No, that's just Dieter and Doyle, they've always been like that. They don't even need an E. Glad to see success hasn't changed them."

I picked up the glass again and looked at her carefully. Whatever was in the drink, it was working. I felt warm and fuzzy and actually quite happy, pleased just to be standing in the same room as Merry again. "Are you not going to...?" I asked, pointing at her glass.

She fondled it longingly, looking at it with desire, but shook her head slowly, smiling up at me from under her eyelashes. "I don't know if it's such a good idea to indulge in something that's supposed to act like an aphrodisiac, with you around."

" _Why_?" I felt a flirtatious smile forming on my face, wondering if that burst of hope was the drug, or the proximity of my ex.

"Especially not with you in those tight leather trousers..." Her eyes flickered up and down my body, then her voice trailed off as she giggled nervously, then she decisively raised the glass and took a gulp of the drink. Was she flirting back at me? For a dazzling moment, the idea flashed before my eyes, that if I played my cards right, if I didn't totally screw this up, I might be able to _win Merry back_... Abruptly she looked up, and met my gaze meaningfully. "So... are you... are you seeing anyone?"

I shook my head and shrugged sadly. "No. Who has the time?"

"Indeed." Silence.

"Are you?" I barely dared to ask.

"What?"

"Seeing anyone?"

She shook her head slowly, painfully. "Danny, I still don't have the inclination to _date_ anyone but you. I haven't since the day I met you."

For a moment, my head spun with relief. She was single! I had a chance. But suddenly her turn of phrase, the undue emphasis she'd put on the ambiguous word 'date' opened up a giddying gulf in the pit of my stomach. Did she mean _date_ as in, have a serious relationship with someone, or _date_ , as in, y'know... sleep with. I'd learned, the hard way, that word had such different connotations in the US and the UK. Which did she mean? There was a part of me that desperately wanted to pin her down, ask her, have you fucked other guys since I've been gone? Were they richer, taller, better-looking than me? Were they _better in bed_ , than me?

But suddenly I shrugged. What did it matter? It wasn't like I was innocent. I'd banged other girls, and only come to the conclusion that, for me, Merry was the best. And the way she was looking at me, nervous, half-excited, biting her lip in anticipation, playing with the ends of her hair, her whole body angled towards me as we leaned over the balcony, what if she kinda felt the same way about me? Like, what kind of girl did I even want? Someone who had never even known what it was like to be with any other dudes except me, and would always be wondering if the grass were greener; or someone who had dated around a bit, and actually actively decided that _I_ was better in bed than all the richer, taller, better-looking dudes? To be honest, that idea was really kind of amazing.

"I see," I said softly. I couldn't stop my stupid face from grinning, feeling my head spinning and my heart pounding. Christ! Think, Daniel, think. You can do this. Should I ask her to dinner? Try to rekindle something for old times' sake? Take her to Sixth Street, and let nostalgia work its course?

"Daniel, do you want to get the fuck out of this party and go back to yours, and just bang like we used to?" she blurted out. "Could we do that? For old times' sake? Is that still... an option, for us?"

I burst into laughter, half surprise and half relief. I had forgotten how blunt she could be. And I had forgotten how much I loved it. But as I saw her face fall, misreading the laughter, I moved towards her, then reached out and cupped her face with my hands. "Christ, Merry, I would love nothing more." Her eyes lit up and her face brightened, as she leaned down and kissed me, forcing her tongue into my mouth with a year's worth of frustration as she took possession of my body again, her hands on my bum, pulling me towards her. In her stack-heeled motorcycle boots, she was at least four inches taller than me. I felt like a doll in her grasp - and I loved it.

When she finally pulled away, I was so hard the leather trousers were almost unbearable. "Shall we go?" she asked, even as I tried desperately to adjust myself.

All I had to do was nod, and she took my hand, and I lead her back through the Sodom and Gomorra of the party. What was real and what was the drugs, I could no longer tell. In the sculpture garden, Blandford lay dreaming on a couch, as Doyle and Auntie Beast made out slowly, languorously, in the corner. In the Victorian parlour, a group of men sat still drinking tea at the table, staring as one steampunk girl did unspeakable things to another with a rubbery tentacle emerging from somewhere between her legs. In the medieval room, Dieter was now handcuffed to the four-poster bed, spread-eagled naked, except a for a Victorian leather corset belted around his waist and his SS hat. One of the violinists from the string quartet, wearing his nazi tie between her naked breasts, straddled his chest backwards, rubbing his erect cock with an ice cube, as the cellist prepared a huge piercing needle and what looked like a Prince Albert ring.

I averted my eyes, even as Dieter raised his head, and exclaimed. "Merry!" In his voice, ragged from cigarettes, it came out _Mare_. "Loved the Rolling Stone shoot... Oh, don't you and Danny-boy scurry off quite so quickly, stay and watch..."

"Fuck off, Dieter," Merry laughed, clearly in too good a mood to even be upset by his blatant taunting. "I had forgotten what he was like. I almost missed him... Almost, but not quite."

"No, stay and watch," urged Dieter, struggling to his elbows, even as a girl dressed like a Disney Fairy Godmother tried to push him back down with her tinsel-bedecked wand. "It's the ultimate fantasy, isn't it? Celebrities watch _you_ , while you get fucked."

"If I'm your idea of a celebrity, you're more fucked up than I thought, Dee."

"Oh, but you are a celebrity, Mare. You've had a number one record, you've been on Top Of The Pops, you've been _naked_ in Rolling Stone... Come here. C'mere and give us a little kiss..." Dieter pursed his lips and arched his back, but one of the Victorian String Quartet latched her mouth onto his instead. I wondered what the fuck kind of drugs Dieter was on that he was not feeling what the other girl was doing to his nether parts, but the mirror and the powdery razor blade abandoned on the floor answered that question.

"Kiss you?" hooted Merry. "What, do you really think that celebrity is like some kind of social disease that you can catch through fucking celebrities?"

"But of course it is, mi'lady," Dieter cackled, breaking free of his kiss. "Oh, the semantics! Celebrity is the _ultimate_ social disease. Don't squander it on Daniel, he doesn't care."

Merry turned to me and gave me a completely transparent look, that seemed to say _yeah, that's exactly why I'm going to fuck him_ , then turned back to Dieter, walking closer to the bed, but still hanging back just out of reach. "I wish I could give it to you, Dee. I wish I could pack all of it - the number one, Top of the Pops, naked pictures in Rolling Stone, celebrity as a fucking social disease - pack all of it in a box and give it to you. Here, it's my gift to you. Have it." She made a strange, open armed gesture as if passing something almost impossibly heavy to him.

The fairy godmother giggled and hopped across the bed. "And so you shall be!" she intoned with mock-seriousness, hitting Dieter with her wand, and all of them on the bed started to laugh, maniacally, slightly desperately, rather than with any real sense of the absurdity of the situation.

Turning away, Merry took my hand and lead me quickly from the room before Dieter could engage us again. I almost wanted to ask her what on earth she had meant, but Merry was laughing too hard to stop as we ploughed through the Louis XIV room and the speakeasy, then made our way across what was now a throbbing dance floor, back out through the control room to the main stairs. Z-Man wasn't joining in the orgy, in fact he wasn't even watching it - he was sitting at the mixing desk of the control room, DJ-ing remotely over the house's sound system.

But Merry and I escaped, running back up the side-street hand in hand, not stopping until we reached the subway, flinging ourselves down the stairs and catching a train by moments. Together, we walked the length of the train carriage and sat in the anti-social seats all the way at the end, resuming our kissing as soon as we were seated. I pulled her legs into my lap, feeling the leather of her trousers slip between my knees, rubbing up against my cock. I felt for her ass, squeezing it gently in the supple leather, then moved my hands upwards. That fucking zipper, it was too much. I grabbed it and yanked gently, slipping a hand into the gap. Naked under leather. Just as I'd dreamed. Caressing her breast, I found her nipple and pulled it erect with thumb and forefinger as I sucked her tongue into his mouth. Was this real? I felt so fuzzy with the drugs that I almost believed that any moment, I would wake up, alone and cold on the bench. But the smell of her hair, the taste of her lips, it was like the loneliness of the past year just fell away like ill-fitting clothes.

But the train ride was too short, and we had to change at Union Square, dashing for the downtown train, pausing only for me to push her up against a column, rubbing my leather clad crotch against hers until the train came. Fuck it, why was the ride so long? I wanted to be home. I wanted to be inside her already. I had waited a fucking year, I could not wait another ten minutes. She tugged my hand, and started to stand up at my old stop, but I shook my head. "I've moved. Oh, right, you haven't seen my new place."

We got off at Spring Street and walked down to my building, as I tried to calm myself so I didn't jizz in my leather jeans; though considering they were Dieter's jeans, really I should have, just to piss him off. Merry was impressed with my new neighbourhood, she loved the building, she was relieved as hell at the freight elevator. And when she walked into my loft, she gasped with joy and ran to the window, pressing her forehead against the glass and staring out at the World Trade Centre, all lit up in the night.

"God, what a fucking rock star flat. Metropolis really are doing well."

"Do you want a glass of wine?" I offered, though really, I was already drunk enough just off the sexual charge still buzzing between us.

"Yes, please."

I walked back and found a bottle, opened it with shaking hands and managed to pour two glasses, feeling every nerve jangling at the idea that she - _Merry_ \- was in my flat, my old life and my new life colliding.

"Wow, can you see the Statue of Liberty from here on a clear day?"

"Wrong angle," I told her, walking up to her and handing her a glass of Chablis before pressing my free hand on the underside of her bum. She was too thin, really, I had preferred it when her ass was like two halves of a ripe peach, soft and yielding, and for a terrible moment, I wanted the old Merry back, that laughing girl wearing costumes outside the Pink Pony, the bouncing bassist, her breasts jiggling up and down as she threw herself about to the Kosmische backbeat. But then again, did I also want the old Daniel back, those ill-fitting shirts that I'd worn before I'd been to Italy, my uncontrollably curly hair, my too long sideburns, before a stylist in LA had tamed both? Maybe in some funny way, I did. But just being with Merry again, I felt like the old me again. But in a good way. I felt young and fresh and borne up on hope again.

She turned away from the window, staring at me both with hunger and with fear. "Is this weird for you?"

"A bit," I confessed, but I couldn't stop looking at her lips, wanting to kiss them again. The taste of her was so strong in my mouth in a way that even the slightly oaky Chablis could not erase. I started babbling with nerves. "Because I haven't seen you in so long and... well, I suppose that isn't exactly true. I mean, I've seen photos of you everywhere, posters and album covers and videos and signs and signifiers, and... but I haven't seen _you_. The real flesh and blood girl."

"Am I the Signifier or the Signified?" She frowned slightly, her face worried, as I reached back to remember the semiology I'd struggled to master at University. "Do you really see me as the flesh and blood girl that you used to date, or am I some weird symbol of sex or music or rock'n'roll or the East Village or a Firbank Model or a Pop Star or... the million and one other things that people project onto me now I've been naked in Rolling Stone?"

"Kind of both, but it's always been like that, since day one. You always teased me for that, even back in the old days."

She frowned harder, her face suddenly filling with trepidation. "Right now, I need someone from the old days. I need to be with someone who remembers who _I_ am, underneath all this pop star tat. It's too damn weird, otherwise."

I shook my head, stepping forward and taking her hands in mine. "You know what's weirdest to me? The fact that this doesn't actually feel weird to me at all. It feels _right_. I look at you, and I _know_ you. I see the girl who doesn't like getting up in the morning, who hits the snooze button 2 or 3 times until I'm late for work. I see the girl who loves ice cream so much she'll walk ten blocks for her favourite flavour. Cherry Vanilla. The girl who has a _system_ for flicking through second hand vinyl, and sings along with The Curse's Prostitution while she does the vacuuming, yes, even the weird, backwards tape-loop bits, no don't look at me like that, I've heard you do it." She cracked a grin at that, and I reached out to touch her face.

She laughed nervously. "Oh god, I haven't hoovered in a year. One of the few perks of being a rock star. Other people always clean up for you. Do you still have that hoover that vacuums in G natural? I had forgotten, I loved that thing."

"How could I have forgotten that you have perfect pitch?" I teased, pushing back her fringe to reveal that tiny scar above her eyebrow. Yes, she was still my girl. I loved that scar so much, even more so now I knew the story of its origin.

Pulling away from me, she shook her bangs back into her face and turned back to the window, her hand finding the iron pillar that supported the face of the building. For a moment, she lightly rested against it, then her head snapped to attention, touching and tapping the unfamiliar material with that familiar curiosity.

"Yeah, it's iron. Original architectural detailing..." I told her, then started to smirk. "Does architecture still make you horny?"

"God yes," she teased, pretending to run her hands up and down the post lasciviously before bursting into giggles.

"Is your favourite building still the ruin of Tintern Abbey?" I asked, moving closer to her again. I don't know what I was trying to prove, that I still remembered all of the tiny details of her life, that I knew her best of anyone, but she nodded, pleased. "Are you still obsessed with medieval saints? Can you still tell them apart by the symbols they hold, castles or fish or keys or whatever?"

She nodded, getting really excited for a moment. "Oh my god, you should see the painted saints they have in Mexico, I saw them on tour last year, and they're amazing..." Abruptly she checked her enthusiasm and fiddled with her hair, as I remembered awkwardly that it was that cancelled Mexican trip that had lead to our break-up. But then she looked up at me with a mischievous grin. "It's funny, the things you remember. Do you still leave your pants on the radiator overnight?"

It was my turn to burst out laughing at the sudden rush of memories. "Of course I do. It means they're warm in the morning when I put them on."

"Do you still buy Billboard every week and mark up the charts with red pen, with your own special significant symbols like you are planning out a village cricket match?"

I threw my head back and laughed some more. "It's hard to get Billboard when you're on tour, but when I can, yes. They're not mysterious symbols, I'm just plotting chart movement, and who I think is going up or down, so I can compare to the next week," I explained patiently. So many times, she must have watched me, doing that at the breakfast table in the old apartment on Ludlow Street when I still worked at Windlass.

"Do you still eat your pizza without ever touching it?" Now she was teasing, I knew it. She'd watched, astonished, one night as I ate a slice from Two Boots off the paper plate, shaking it carefully towards my mouth without ever getting any grease on my fingertips.

"I sure do. After I've been out all night drinking in dive bars and touching god knows what, do you think I want to touch my food with those hands?" I showed her the palms of my hands.

"I bet you still eat pizza with a knife and fork when you're at home. And then put the cutlery straight down the centre of your plate when you're finished eating like you're waiting for the butler to clear it away."

"It's just civilised, OK?" I shrugged.

"And I bet, if I went and looked in your kitchen cabinets, that your spice rack is still in alphabetical order."

"Yup. Absolutely right. I am still the same uptight square you have always known." I nodded slowly, just looking at her, like I was running out of words and overwhelmed by memories and just wanted to touch her, just wanted to kiss her again. Staring at her mouth, I wondered how we'd managed to stop that subway-induced semi-crazed making out in the too-bright lights of my apartment. I wanted to reach out and touch her, pull her into an embrace and crush her against me, but I was afraid that my hands would start shaking.

She laughed, but it, too, was kind of a desperate laugh, without much humour. "Danny, I never thought you were an 'uptight square' but just..."

"But what? What did you think about me?" I wasn't even sure what I was asking. On one level, I was thinking, you know, fuck this: I'm a rock star now. Why did I care what some chick thought about me? But on another level... This was _Merry_. Merry, who had known me, got inside me, like no one else ever had. It was my band that always treated me like an uptight square, not as cool as Dieter, not as sexy as Doyle, but Merry never had. Merry had been frustrated with me, maybe even exasperated with me, but she had always taken me seriously.

Her eyes got a misty, faraway look. "I remember, you used to have this little binder, in which you wrote down, like... all the settings for your amp, and your guitar pedals, and your guitar, to get the exact right guitar tone to sound exactly like... the Velvet Underground, Dead Letters, The Smiths, Mexican Summers, The Curse, all the bands you loved..."

I blushed to remember it. "OK, yeah, you're right. I totally did. I probably even still have it somewhere."

"But the thing is, to get signed, you had to work out what Metropolis sounded like. Musketeer didn't want another Mexican Summers or another Dead Letters. They wanted something fresh, something original. And it took you four years of schlepping round the East Village playing shitty gigs at the Lacuna Lounge to work out who _Metropolis_ were."

"OK, that's fair, too." I didn't like it, but it was fair. It was Dick, really, who had joined and pushed us into sounding like Metropolis instead of a bad Dead Letters tribute band.

She moved closer to me, and pushed my hair out of my face. "When I first met you, you were a lot like that binder, you were this weird assemblage of people you thought were cool. I had to sift through all these bits and pieces, to figure out who Daniel J Asheton was, to fall in love with him."

It shocked me to hear her say this, and I wondered why she'd never said it before, back then. Or maybe she had, and I hadn't known how to listen. But as I opened my mouth to protest, she put her finger over it.

"And when you first made love to me, it was like you had a binder labelled 'Merry' where you wrote down all the directions of how to have sex with a girl, like, kiss thigh here, tweak nipple there..."

It was so ridiculous I actually burst out laughing. "Come on, I was never that bad... you used to enjoy having sex with me."

"I did." She grinned naughtily, biting her lip, and for a second I felt my breath catch in my throat, remembering the things she'd done to me with those lips. "But only after I spent ages teaching you, Danny, put away the binders and the notebooks and the guides. Be with me, here, now, react to _me_ , the girl in your arms, not some idea of How To Make Love To Girls you read in a book once at NYU. I need that, again, Danny. But I need this to not _just_ be about the past. We've both changed, you and I. I need someone to react to who I am, now, not some idea in their head of who I should be. Can you do that?"

"I learned, didn't I?" Taking her hand in mine, I kissed it, then lowered it from my lips and held it to my chest, held it to my chest and took a deep breath. "I know we've got a lot of catching up to do. We could catch up in bed... or just talking over a bottle of wine. Or however you want." My heart was pounding in my chest so hard I was afraid she could feel it through my leather jacket. " _You_ said you wanted to bang me. Do you still want to do this, or don't you?" I breathed, barely daring to speak, terrified of what her answer might be.

"I don't know. I was so sure of what I wanted when we left the party, but... Maybe it was just nostalgia and the effects of that tiny bit of E. The old Merry would totally do it, would totally just bang you, but..." Her face changed, grew terribly sad again. "I'm not that same Merry any more. God, what a mad idea to just come here with you like this... I don't even have any spare clothes to stay the night..." With her free hand, she hugged herself tightly, chewing her lower lip as she stared at me, and it was then that I saw her own hands were shaking with nerves, like she found this as terrifying and exhilarating as I did.

"You do, you know." Letting go of her hand, I turned and went back past the kitchen to the massive storage area next to the tiny bathroom, and dug through my piles of half-unpacked boxes, until I found what I was looking for. Extracting an old fashioned 1960s style suitcase, I hauled it back out to the main room, and dumped it on the floor in front of her.

"Oh my god, my suitcase. I can't believe you kept it..." Sinking to her knees, she clicked it open, to find everything almost exactly as she had left it. Two changes of clothes, pyjamas, slippers and a bag of toiletries.

"Of course I kept it. I never really stopped believing that you would come back to me some day." There, it was out. Let her make what she would of that.

"Oh, Danny..." Crouching on her knees, she knelt facing me, looking up, gazing into my eyes, reflecting back lust but also confusion. "What are you asking for? Can we really do this? I don't know if you and me, if we can do just casual sex. You and I are not casual people, and nothing between us, has ever been _casual_."

"What are _you_ asking for?" I blinked slowly, afraid to articulate what I really wanted. Me, I wanted her back, all the way, the way it used to be. I wanted her to be my girlfriend - or even my _girl-thing_ \- again. I wanted all those secret love-words and codes that only the two of us understood. I wanted our whole _thing_ back. But did this new, familiar-unfamiliar Merry want all those things, too? "Do you want just a sex thing?" I asked carefully. "Because, really... I'm fine with the whole sex thing. I am totally fine with just banging you if just banging is what you want. But... do you want more? Do you want to actually get back together? Is that what you're saying?"

"What do _you_ want?" Her voice was very low, very raw, as she crouched there, coiled like a lioness, every muscle tensed under the leather catsuit.

"I want..." If I told her the whole truth, would I scare her off? Should I just lie and say I wanted to keep things casual until I was sure of what she wanted? No, I could never lie to Merry. She was right; nothing between us was ever casual. Me and her, it was the real deal. I wanted it back. All of it. So I took a deep breath and swallowed. "I think I want the whole getting back together thing."

For a long minute, we just froze there, staring at one another, then slowly she stood up as if uncoiling herself. "Me, too," she said, very quietly, relief seeping across her face. "If you really think so."

I finally exhaled. "Oh god, Merry, I don't just _think_ so. I know I want you back. I want _us_ back. Let me _daw_ you again."

"Oh, thank fuck you said that first. Because I want that more than anything, but I was too afraid to ask in case you said no." And then she kissed me. And this kiss, this open, honest, hungry kiss, unlike the crazed, drug-induced making out on the L train, this kiss told me everything I needed to know.

Tentatively, we moved together, tangling arms and legs, kissing, pulling back to stare, then kissing again. I grabbed the big silver hoop and pulled it lower, letting her breasts spill out into the night, and thank fuck her breasts were the same, though her collarbones showed above them. Sinking to my knees, I took first one nipple, then the other in my mouth, then somehow we staggered backwards together until we found my bed. My jacket was off, my Breton jumper abandoned as she unzipped me and pushed her hands down between the leather and my skin. Her catsuit was half on, half off, unzipped to the crotch, and I was rubbing my knuckles up against the leather seam between her legs until she started to writhe. She found my cock and closed her hand around it, sucking my tongue into her mouth as if a prelude, and we started to just roll around together. I was panting as she wriggled out of the last of her clothes, but she stopped me as I tried to pull the leather jeans off my hips.

"Leave them on," she breathed in my ear. "I like the way they feel against my skin."

"Isn't it a bit weird for a vegetarian to want to fuck in leather..." I teased, then suddenly paused, straightening my arms and propping myself up above her, looking down at her face. "You are still a vegetarian, right?"

"I am. Are you?"

"Meat is Murder," I chuckled.

"Good." She laughed and flipped me over onto my back, holding me down by my wrists, her hair falling in my face as she looked down at me like she wanted to devour me. "Christ, I want you in me, Danny... Right now."

"Do you have any of those weird condoms of yours?" I gasped, bucking against her, trying to get inside her.

She shook her head mournfully. "How was I supposed to know I'd see you tonight?" But then she paused, letting my hands go and slumping back against me, kissing my chest tenderly, a kitten-like tongue against my nipple sending a shiver up my spine. How could I have ever felt so self-conscious about my skinny, hairless chest when Merry so obviously treated it like her own personal sex toy of pure sensual delight? "Do you remember that afternoon in Connecticut, when we fucked in that crazy yuppie-ass house?"

"Oh god, yes, I remember it." Nostalgia wrapped around me like a fuzzy blanket as she propped herself up on one elbow. Raising my hand, I pushed her hair out of her face and cupped the back of her head, wanting to pull her back towards me.

"You said you'd just marry me if you got me pregnant." She didn't need to remind me, I could still remember the feeling of being inside her, bareback, her wetness so warm against me.

"If I get you pregnant this time, will you marry me? Will you come back? And stay with me? For ever? For ever-ever? For real?" I stared up into her eyes, feeling suddenly very sober and hyper-aware of everywhere my skin touched hers.

She looked down at me with open lust, then a reckless grin came across her face. "Get me pregnant, then, you bastard. Do your best."

With a burst of strength, I flipped her over with a cry of triumph, held her down by the shoulders and pushed into her. Oh god, yes, that tight, warm second mouth closing around my dick, the way she yielded to me, and yet clenched me tight. I pushed into her, searched around, guessing by the expression on her face as I neared that one perfect angle that drove her into ecstasies. And now she was moaning aloud, writhing her hips, jamming herself up onto me, and I could not believe how quickly she came, calling my name and grabbing my hair in clumps as she bucked beneath me. I came shortly after, surprised by the intensity of my orgasm, but then again, it had been so fucking long. Too fucking long, I thought as we lay together in the half light of the street lamps shining in the uncurtained windows, tracing each others faces and just staring at one another, as if barely believing any of this was real.

Merry. I had Merry in my bed again, and all was right with the world.


	25. Since You've Been Gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So Daniel and Merry are back together, totally in love, and planning to get married and have a baby (not necessarily in that order). And this time, Daniel is resolved to act like an adult, and confront head-on the jealousy that tore them apart last time.
> 
> But with Merry back in his life, that means that all the trouble brewing in the Deltawave camp is also back in Daniel's life, as Merry lets him in on all of the details of her past year without him.
> 
> Trigger warning: there is some discussion of Eating Disorders in this and the next chapter.

I dreamed of Merry that night, like I almost always dreamed of Merry, but in the morning, as I struggled awake, I still smelled that almond-coconut scent and felt the cobwebby silk of hair across my chest. When I opened my eyes, I looked down, and there she was, no dream, my blonde goddess with her head resting against my ribs, butter coloured hair splayed all across my chest.

Extending cautious fingertips, I stroked her hair, almost to make sure she was real, then softly breathed "Mrs Asheton," as if trying to remind her that yes, she really had agreed to this last night.

She squirmed slightly, then opened her eyes, soft, unfocused, and smirked. "No way. I'm not taking your name. Not when I've had to spend nearly two years teaching the music press how to spell Wythenshawe."

"Alright," I conceded. "I'll take your name. Daniel J. Wythenshawe. That's a bit of a mouthful. Maybe we can be like John and Yoko and combine our names into something new. Ashenshawe. Wythton."

She laughed and squeezed me tight around the waist, bringing her whole body into the hug, arms and legs. "I can't believe you're really real, that it's you again. That this isn't just another dream. I keep thinking I'll wake up and find you gone again." 

"Nope, I am actually here." I reached down and cupped her knee with my hand, delighting in the softness of her skin, wanting to rub my stubbly face all over her ticklish bits. "And I am never going to let you go again." Neither of us wanted to get up, we just lay together, basking in the morning sun, reacquainting ourselves with every inch of each others' skin, the same scars, the same moles, the same calluses. 

"You know," she suggested, carefully examining the childhood immunisation mark at the top of my shoulder with the same intensity I'd checked for the familiar scar above her eyebrow. "We should get tattoos, so we never forget each other again."

"I never forgot you," I whispered. "Never."

"But tattoos would be there to remind us, even when the other one of us wasn't."

"I dunno. Tattoos? Isn't that awfully permanent?" I asked reluctantly, remembering how awkward I'd felt next to Doyle's and Dick's inked skin.

"You're trying to put a baby in me, and you think tattoos are too permanent?" Merry laughed, tracing my jawline with her finger. I needed to shave, but she seemed to be having fun with my scruffy stubble.

So somehow we ended up at a tattoo parlour up on 10th Street, that Dick had said was alright. I wanted mine out of the way, where no one would see, just a private thing, between the two of us. Not because I was ashamed of it, but more like I wanted there to be some part of my life that we could keep private, just for Merry and me, kept hidden, away from Dieter and Doyle, away from KROQ and Rolling Stone and the NME. So both of us chose the joint of the second toe on our left feet, Merry insisting that she had read in some reflexology book once that there was a vein that went straight from there to the heart. Merry got 'Daniel' in tiny capital letters, and I got 'Merry' in flowing cursive script. And as I rolled my sock over the bandage, I felt that that, somehow, was more of a promise than an engagement ring. Then we stopped at a locksmith on the way home, and I got a second set of keys made for my loft, and put them on a chain around her neck, telling her that my home was now her home.

Two weeks, we spent in my flat, banging right through Christmas and then New Year's, like we were making up for lost time. A year's worth of lost time. A year's worth of flirting, packed into two weeks. A year's worth of snuggling and canoodling and lying together on the sofa. A year's worth of 'oh, Danny, did you hear this album?" and 'oh, Merry, did you see this film?' and playing CDs and DVDs for one another, waiting joyfully for the other's reaction. And a year's worth of those little tiny minutia from the inside of her head she wanted to share with me, and I desperately wanted to hear from her, because everything about her was endlessly fucking fascinating and amazing and adorable. And the way that she turned towards me when I told her the trivialities of my own life, and beamed at me with that mixture of attention and enthusiasm and bemusement, like, honestly, she even expressed an interest in the cut of the collars of my Italian shirts, because she said I looked 'drop-dead sexy' in them. OK, maybe we disappeared up our own asses for a little bit, stopped answering the phone, stopped going anywhere except the Chinese supermarket down on Canal St where we bought our groceries, but really, I didn't care, because being with Merry was the best damned drug I had ever had.

I felt... I dunno, I actually felt _easier_ with her the second time around. Like, I didn't feel that sickening, terrifying sense of mingled fear and jealousy when other men looked at her, like men _always_ looked at her, even when we were just walking up Broadway, because Jesus Christ, she was fucking stunning in a way that the dark sunglasses and big furry Russian hat she wore to obscure her identity only seemed to accentuate. There was a part of me that had finally realised, had finally accepted, that even if I lost hold of her hand in a crowd, I'd get to the end of the block and turn around, and there she would be after a few minutes, grinning apologetically at me as she finished signing autographs then trotted after me, taking my hand again and squeezing it. Because it seemed somehow fated now, that we were going to be together, no matter what, and even if Merry and I lost sight of one another for a brief time, she would still always find her way back to me.

And after what seemed an acceptable amount of time, once we'd fallen back into our rhythm and got used to being with one another again (though really, I wasn't sure I'd ever entirely get used to her hanging out at my kitchen table, wearing nothing but a pair of my boxer shorts and a little itty bitty undershirt that used to be mine, stretched so tight across her breasts that her nipples in the cold kitchen would actually distract me from our morning grapefruit, and make me want to climb straight back into bed and burrow my way inside her... Jesus, I didn't think I would ever get used to that, nor did I really want to.) But, still, one cosy evening when we'd both gorged ourselves on Chinese takeaway, and I'd had two glasses of Chablis, even thought she'd abstained just in case my sperm had scored a babymaking-bullseye, and we were lying together, snuggling on the sofa, I finally gave into my curiosity and broached the subject.

"So when we were apart, I know you said you didn't _date_ anyone, not seriously, but did you get with anyone, like on a casual level?"

Raising her head from my chest, she turned and looked at me, like really _looked_ at me, with a penetrating gaze. "Do you really want to know the answer to that?"

"So I take it that's a yes, then? You slept with other guys?" Oddly, it didn't actually hurt. Maybe it would have hurt, had I heard it back then, at a time when she wasn't lying splayed, half-naked in my arms. But this felt kind of OK, like, I could handle this, now she was mine again.

Her mouth twisted into a frown. "Are you gonna get all weird and jealous on me now?"

"I"m not jealous," I insisted. "I'm just curious. Because..." Well, if I wanted her honesty, I had to lead with some of my own, didn't I? "Because I thought I should be honest, and tell you that I slept with a couple of other people while we were apart."

"Oh," she said, lowering her head and nestling it back into the hollow between my neck and my chest. "So that's what this is about. Your conscience is bothering you, and you want to make your own confession."

"They say it's good for the soul," I shrugged. "And also... well, I don't want there to be secrets between us. I think that's what fucked us up last time. I didn't tell you everything that was going on in my head, I just let it brood until it festered."

"I suppose," she agreed with a deep sigh. "If you want to tell me, then tell me. I'll try not to be jealous."

I paused, bending down and trying to look into her eyes, surprised by what she'd just said. "You? Jealous? I didn't think you had it in you."

Burying her head in my chest, she wrapped her arms more tightly around my skinny waist, but didn't reply.

"OK," I stuttered, suddenly feeling like so many things had shifted between us. Merry, jealous over me? In the old days, she'd always just laughed at the thought, as if knowing full well that the idea, that I might want to get with any woman but a goddess like her, was just plain ridiculous. "We don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

"No, you're right," she murmured into my pyjama top. "We should talk about it now you've brought it up. Stuff happened, and we should get it out in the open, so neither of us develop wild fantasies about what that stuff might have been. You tell me and I'll tell you." Raising her head, she pulled away slightly and sat opposite me, watching my face as I talked.

I told her about Sandra first, about our hesitant flirtation, and how I'd almost taken advantage of her, but at the last minute, decided that we shared something much sweeter and deeper than just sex. And at that, Merry actually put her hand over her mouth and started to laugh a little bit.

"She sounds adorable. I'd kinda like to meet her, some day," Merry confessed.

"She'd probably love that," I laughed. "She was a fan of yours first when I met her - I swear she only thought I was cool by association." Then, made bold by her positive reaction, I told her about the girls in Italy, skipping over the details, but telling her how weird it had been, the fine line between getting drunk enough that I overcame my natural shyness and so drunk I couldn't perform. I mean, I kinda made myself the butt of the joke a bit, laughing at being reduced to giving a girl head when my cock had refused to rise to the occasion.

Merry made a strange face I couldn't entirely read. "I suppose, on one level, Jesus, lucky girl, because I know you are _amazing_ with your tongue, but..." And for a moment, that strange face deepened, became actual insecurity, something I had not seen on Merry's face since our very first date, that awkward afternoon at the Met. But then she shrugged, and purposefully rearranged her face back to a jaunty smile. "I said I wouldn't be jealous, and I won't."

"There really is no reason to be jealous. It wasn't all that great, you know," I told her earnestly. "That's kinda the point. I wanted you to know, what it was really like, so you didn't start to think that touring, for me, was just one long orgy, like it is for the other dudes in Metropolis, like they represent us in the press as total ladies' men or whatever. It's often kinda weird, being pursued by girls who are into some weird image of you because of your music, and not really something I particularly got into the swing of, so to speak. I did it once or twice, because it was there, because I wanted to know what it was like, but underneath it all, mostly I just missed _you_." Then I frowned, and moved on to the embarrassing story of the radio DJ in Oregon. At first, I was tempted to spare her the gory details to save her the jealousy, but she seemed so unfazed by the blow-job that I went on, until she started to squirm with embarrassment as I described how completely I'd blanked on the girl's name.

"Oh god how awkward," she conceded, as her squirm turned to a half-laugh. "But I can't say it hasn't happened to me."

"Really?" I nudged her gently with my elbow, amazed at how painful this didn't feel, more like some ancient history we were free to laugh at now that we had found one another again. "Go on, your turn."

"Yeah, oh god, I almost don't want to tell you."

"Worse than forgetting a DJ's name in the middle of a blow-job?"

She nodded slowly. "Much worse, because this was an actual fan. It was a guy... well, he had actually won a contest to meet Deltawave, and he was so... so sweet, and so awestruck, and I was lonely and a bit drunk, and he was really laying on the flattery so thick, telling me I was beautiful, telling me I was talented, that he was in love with my songs... that after the party, I invited him up to my hotel room for a private drink - wow, bad idea..."

"I know exactly how that goes," I confessed. "Loneliness and flattery is a bad combination, but add booze..."

"Yeah, we got more than a bit drunk, and he was really cute, and I was carried away by the flattery and one thing lead to another and... oh my god, this is the worst. I didn't just forget his name. I actually... when we were, y'know... at the worst possible moment, I cried out, and accidentally called him _Danny_."

I burst out laughing; I couldn't help it. Maybe I should have been angry, but it was just so absurd, so funny, so _Merry_. "I don't know whether to be hideously offended or completely flattered. The poor guy! Did he notice?"

She nodded, but her embarrassment had turned to uncontrollable giggles, dumbstruck for a moment.

"What did he do?"

"Oh my god, that wasn't even the worst of it. He totally lost his erection, like instantly. He was so flustered. It was just gone, completely killed the mood. I kept telling him it's OK, it's fine, but it was so obviously not fine... oh my god. Like, I'm terrified that it didn't just ruin the sex for him, it totally ruined his love of the band, which had been so pure and so beautiful before. I felt like such an ogre. But he ran around the room like it was on fire, he grabbed all of his things, he just packed up all of his stuff and shot out of my room like a bat out of hell."

"The poor guy," I tried to commiserate, but her laughter was infectious. I had thought this was going to be painful, but Merry was so blunt, so straightforward about this kind of thing that it was easy to follow her lead and lapse into quietly self-effacing humour. "He's probably going to end up having to get therapy on account of you..."

"Shut up!" She hit me, but it was a playful slap, and I caught her hand and kissed it, folding it against my chest. The fact that we were both laughing about this, that was a good sign, right?

"And that was the one and only time I ever got with a _fan_ fan." Her face abruptly grew serious again. "But it's so hard to tell the difference sometimes. Like, just because someone is in the industry, or even just because they're famous themselves, that doesn't mean they're not a fan."

Stroking her hand gently, I looked at her evenly, as the meaning of what she'd just said sunk in. "Go on..."

She shook her head. "I don't even know if I should tell you this..."

"We can tell each other anything, right?" I suggested softly.

"You promise not to get weird on me?"

"Why?" For a second, my heart twitched in my chest, a faint ghost echo of my old jealousy. "It's not someone I know, is it? Not someone from the NYC scene..."

"No," she said, quickly and decisively enough to banish the ghost echoes. "I would never have gone with anyone you actually _know_ , personally. OK, I mean... Fab Tiberi did ask me out, but..."

'What?" I exploded, feeling my face grow hot, like, what the fuck? I had stood chatting with him at Arlene's Grocery and he hadn't even bothered telling me he had put the moves on my ex? I made a mental note to never _ever_ go and see any of his shitty fucking bands ever again.

"He tried to get me to fly to Europe with him, with some bullshit story about taking me to some private island his grandparents owned. I told him _no_ in no uncertain terms. It was just totally fucking weird, like, he wasn't even interested in me, as a person, he just thought it would be good for his band to be seen dating me, like he kept saying dating me had done wonders for Danny Asheton and Metropolis, and holy shit, like, I have never been attracted to Fab Tiberi, but that just skeeved me the fuck out."

I stared at her, like, not even jealous any more, but just outraged on her behalf. "What a creep." She smiled and shrugged, but her face remained torn, like she was trying to make up her mind whether to tell me something or not. "So this other guy that you slept with, who is famous enough for me to know, but isn't from New York...?"

"You don't _know_ him, know him, because like... I think you would have told me if you'd met him..."

"Wait, so it's someone I'm a _fan_ of?" My mind reeled. "Or _you're_ a fan of?"

"OK, so we got invited, personally, through Cindy, to go to their show at Madison Square Garden - and he rolled out the red carpet - seats in the VIP box, invite to the aftershow party, the whole nine yards, everything."

"Who?" I demanded.

"You have to promise not to freak out," she insisted.

"I promise... but who? Who the hell would you be that impressed by? Slur? The Curse? Echo and the Bunnymen?"

"Dead Letters," she said, and the words dropped between us like a stone.

For a moment, I couldn't even breathe. I reached for air, but my lungs felt filled with something solid, almost like I was having an asthma attack, but I couldn't even remember where my puffer was, I hadn't even seen it since I moved. But no, it wasn't my asthma, it was something harder, sharper, a pressure that was located not in my lungs, but in my heart. It wasn't even jealousy, it was pure _envy_.

"You're freaking out. Are you gonna hyperventilate? Should I get you a paper bag? I think I saw your asthma inhaler in the kitchen drawer..." She hovered, so full of concern, or maybe she was just trying to change the subject.

"I'm not freaking out," I insisted, though it was still awfully hard to get the air in my lungs to speak with. "What was it like, the show? I heard they played _Snow Day In New York_ at the Garden."

"They did, it was magical," Merry enthused. "Matthew turned to the VIP box, and actually sung about half the second verse to us. It was so beautiful, I don't mean any disrespect, you know I love Metropolis, but they took that song to another level."

"So you slept with Matthew," I managed to squeak.

"Don't be silly." Merry rolled her eyes. "Mattie's gay as a row of tents. He and Cindy go way back, hence how we got the tickets."

"So who..." My voice just gave out.

"Pete," she confessed, in a voice she was clearly trying to keep from shaking.

"Peter Book," I repeated, as if I really needed to confirm who the fucking bass player for Dead fucking Letters was. Merry nodded quickly, her mouth a perfect squiggle of both apology and something else - pride? "You fucked Peter Book?" My head felt like it was spinning, and I suddenly wished I'd drunk less of the bottle of Chablis. "What was it like?" I heard a voice that sounded something like mine ask aloud.

"Are you asking as my jealous boyfriend, wanting to know about the exes of my distant past, or are you asking as the biggest Dead Letters fanatic in the Collegiate School lounge?" She had taken my hand, and was now stroking it gently in her lap.

"Both of those, but also the guitarist of a band who never wants to have their fucking basslines compared to Dead fucking Letters ever again, I guess?" I really didn't know how to handle this - on any level. "I mean, you don't have to tell me what fucking him was like, or what his cock was like - unless you really want to - but just... y'know... what was he _like_?"

Merry laughed, slightly dismissively. "His cock was not really all that, if you must know. The sex wasn't that great, either, or maybe I was just too starstruck, or..." She shrugged prettily. "It was a bit of a weird situation, as you can imagine."

"Wait, wait, wait," I stuttered. "What did you just say?"

"It was a weird situation..."

"No, earlier. Back up. So his cock was not all that, and the sex wasn't that great..." The grin started small, but soon spread all over my face like a blush. "So you're saying that although Dead Letters' version of _Snow Day In New York_ is better than ours, that I am actually better in bed than Peter Book."

Now she started to laugh, relief flooding her face at the idea that I was actually amused instead of angry. "Well, if you want to put it that way, yeah..."

"Yeah, now do you wanna call up the NME and Spin Magazine and tell them that?" I teased. "Like, put that in writing. Press release. Metropolis: better in bed than Dead Letters. Official."

"Daniel," she warned, and I knew I was in trouble, because she never called me that, she always called me Danny.

"I'm kidding... but seriously. You're with me, and not him? I'd be with him and not me, if it were my choice," I blurted out, suddenly feeling completely unsettled, like the teenage Dead Letters fan in me was so completely starstruck by the very idea.

"That did cross my mind, a couple of times. I knew you'd be jealous of me if I did, but you'd be more angry with me if I had the chance, and didn't."

"A couple of times? How long did this go on for?" That was definitely the jealous boyfriend again.

She squirmed in her seat. "A couple of months? It was weird, like I said. He chatted me up all evening at the MSG aftershow, and then asked for my phone number. I didn't even have a phone number to give him at that point, and I was hardly gonna give him the line at my Mum's house, so I gave him Cindy's cellphone number, like, not expecting to ever hear from him again. And then a couple of weeks later, there's this call. _'We're in Paris tonight. I know you're in London. Get a cab to Heathrow, there will be a ticket in your name for the last flight tonight.'_ And just like that, he flew me out to Paris, we spent the night together, then he put me straight back on the plane the next morning, and on to the next date of our tour."

"Wow," I said dumbly, just thinking to myself, like, how the hell was I even supposed to compete with that? That was definitely the guitarist who was sick of incessantly being compared unfavourably to Dead Letters, and felt this was just another way I didn't measure up.

"And it would be like that, every few weeks. I'd get a call, and a plane ticket, like he'd worked out my nights off with Cindy. Monaco. Sao Paulo. Tel Aviv. Except I wouldn't even see the city. I'd just fly in and there would be a driver at the airport with my name on one of those little cards, who would whisk me back to Dead Letters' hotel and straight up to Pete's room."

"And you don't call that _dating_ ," I asked, feeling more than slightly defensive, though really, I wasn't sure which I was more defensive about. The fact that my girlfriend had been sleeping with a member of my favourite band - or the fact that Dead Letters could afford to fly Merry off around the world to visit them on tour, and I, well, really, that was the sort of thing I _should_ have done, to keep our relationship alive over that missing year, and my band just couldn't afford to.

"No. It wasn't like dating at all," Merry interrupted, shattering the fantasy I'd been building in my head. "It was all so totally businesslike. Almost like I was a piece of equipment being ordered in, like, to _service_ him. You asked me, what is he like - well, that's my overwhelming impression. Very businesslike. Very fastidious, very exacting, like I thought you were a perfectionist, well, holy shit. He'd make me change if he didn't like my outfit, like I'd get to his hotel, and there would be a dress for me - you know, wear this to dinner with me, but take it off and hang it up as soon as we get back to the hotel room. Not because he wants to get me naked, but because he doesn't want me to get it dirty because it's going back to the shop tomorrow."

"Cheap, too, huh," I observed, remembering Jeanette's tales of how Matthew went through lumberjack shirts. "I guess he and Matthew are polar opposites on that account."

"He and Mattie _loathe_ one other. They don't even talk, like each of them has a PA just to speak to the other one, and they communicate through third parties, even at the soundchecks. They fucking hate each other. There's no way they'd still be doing the band at all if they weren't making so much fucking money at all those stadium shows. They don't even go in the studio at the same time - Pete and Steve write all of the songs, and record the whole album, then clear out while Mattie comes in to cut the vocals. Like... on one level, it's really fucking sad that they're trapped in this situation where they are working with people they totally fucking hate. But on another... I guess it's kinda reassuring that even the biggest bands in the world, they have _creative differences_ , too."

I stared at her, trying to imagine what Metropolis might be like, 12 albums into the future, if Doyle and Dieter refused to be in the studio at the same time. "Christ, I almost wish you hadn't told me that. It's one thing to know that Peter Book is a flop in bed, but to learn that your favourite band all hate each other, and only stay together because the money's too good... that's kinda disillusioning."

Merry eyed me evenly. "You worked at Windlass for how long, and you still have illusions left to dispel?"

"A few, yeah," I mock-sobbed.

"OK, I guess I shouldn't tell you the rest, huh."

"There's more?" I picked up her hand and raised it to my mouth, brushing my lips back and forth over her knuckles. "I mean, I guess I don't mind being too disillusioned if it's more about how much bigger my cock is, and how I rock your body like a hurricane, and that's why you're gonna marry me and not him."

She winced slightly, then pulled a wry face. "There was no chance of that."

I kissed her again and sucked one of her fingers into my mouth, thinking, really I should buy her a ring or something. "Tell me."

"Well, this is how much of an idiot I was. I got stupid, I thought after this went on three or four times, that we might actually have a _thing_. So I borrowed Cindy's cellphone one night and rang him back, thinking he'd be happy that I'd reached out to him, and surprised him. But no... Jesus fucking Christ, I got a bollocking. He was furious, I could hear it in his voice, though he was being really fucking weirdly cold with me, like not even answering any of my apologies, just acting like I was a fucking roadie wanting to know something about his bass intonation or something."

"What the fuck?" I could see the disappointment on her face, and felt outraged on her behalf, even though clearly, if whatever had happened with him hadn't happened, might she still be with this asshole, and not me?

"He calls me two days later, like nothing had even gone down, tells me to get on a plane for Tokyo. I said no, and demanded to know what the fuck had happened when I called before. He got really short with me - said never, ever call him. Wait for him to call me, and he would make the plans. I demanded to know why. He told me his _wife_ and two _children_ had flown out to visit him on the school holidays."

"Holy fucking shit." I gave an involuntary shiver. "I had no idea the guy was even married. He's never even mentioned it in interviews. I mean, Steve, yeah, everyone knows Steve is married, but Pete?"

She shook her head. "I had no idea, either. I mean, this is the dark side of that whole fucking _available_ bullshit that managers like Michael pull, of pretending the boys and girls in the band are single and available and primed for fantasies. Like, this isn't even about fantasies of availability, because Dead Letters are all middle-aged men now, no matter how long Pete keeps playing on his image of having been a sex symbol back in the 80s. This is about Pete getting to screw around on the road and keep a secret wife and kids back in Minneapolis."

"I'm so sorry," I said stupidly, though to be honest, as outraged as I was on Merry's behalf, I was also secretly kinda relieved that really, truly, Peter Book was not actually the love rival I'd worried he might still be.

"I mean, stupid me for not knowing, right? But he didn't even wear a ring."

"I will definitely wear a ring," I told her, massaging her hand. "In fact, when you and I get married, my parents will probably have it announced in the New York Times. I want everyone to know, I'm with you, and you're with me, and you and me, we are forever."

"Is anything forever, in the fucking music industry?" Merry sighed, and I saw her hand twitch towards the half-empty bottle of Chablis on the floor, before she stopped herself and folded her hands across her stomach, caressing her still-flat belly.

I suddenly remembered another conversation, that her words strangely echoed. And then I realised that that was something I hadn't told her, and probably should. "In the spirit of confession, there's something else I should probably tell you."

"What, that while I was away on tour, you actually secretly married, I dunno, Emma Charms or someone."

"As if!" I snorted, at the idea that any of those Charms girls would ever even consider getting with a guy like me. "I... uh... while I was on tour in Europe, I had a bit of a snog with Jeanette Flores."

"No fucking way!" Merry's eyes were huge, outraged, flashing with jealousy as she actually made a fist and whacked me on the leg, harder than was really necessary.

"Hey, don't get mad at me. Jeanette Flores was on my free pass exception list, you can not get jealous with me..." I held up my hands to block blows that didn't follow.

"I'm not jealous," Merry spat. "It's just... you know that Jeanette is married. I at least had the excuse of not knowing about Pete. You have no excuse."

"Except she's not, Merry. She and Jorge split up years back. I mean, we were drunk, and it went nowhere - in fact, she passed out before it went any further than a few kisses - and we're friends now, like, proper friends, so I will never betray that trust. But I just needed you to know - that that weirdness, that weird blurring between someone being famous, and someone being a fan in _that_ way - I understand about that. And all kidding aside, there's no way I'm judging you for what happened with Pete. It happened; it's in the past. I accept that."

But Merry still looked almost inescapably sad. "Jeanette and Jorge split up? Really? I can't believe that. Like, how am I supposed to _Believe In True Love_ , and the _Wedding Cake Blues_ , and all that... if even they can't make it work?"

"You can believe in true love because of you and me, Merry. Because of everything that's happened over the past year, all the crazy shit, after all the heartbreak and the dumb messing about with the wrong people, you and me still found one another again, and discovered that after all this time, we are still dazzlingly, desperately in love with each other. And I am gonna marry you, and you are gonna have my baby, and in ten years, you and I are gonna look back on this conversation and laugh, because Jeanette Flores and Peter Book... as fucking _if_."

Merry looked at me, her lower lip trembling slightly, but then she folded herself up, crumpling herself into my lap, mumbling "I fucking daw you," as she laid her head against my chest again, and my heart just started thumping with happiness at the old, familiar word as I bent down to kiss the top of her head. "I'm gonna have your baby," she mumbled into my shirt, and I kissed her, telling her yup. "And we're gonna get married." I kissed her again and told her yup. "And you daw me."

"I do. I have been around the world, now, and found that you are the only damn girl in the whole world for me. So I guess... you going around the world, did you find out that I was the only boy in the world for you?"

Merry didn't reply, she just laughed, and wrapped her arms around my waist even tighter, nudging my pyjama top out of the way with her nose before blowing a giant raspberry against my belly button. And I laughed, partly because it tickled, but partly because Merry always had the best response to everything.

 

\----------

 

I thought constantly of marrying her, I thought constantly of the baby we were making together, my features and hers blended together in some new small person. And why not? I was so together now, such an adult. I owned my own apartment, I made good money, I even had health insurance: I could take care of all three of us. But then I thought about the past few weeks, how we'd come back together stronger than we'd been before, and felt a surge of pride. Being an adult, a real adult, it was about more than just having a mortgage or health insurance benefits. It was about owning up to your problems, facing them down and taking responsibility to fix them. The whole jealousy thing, that had ripped our relationship apart before, I had faced up to it, and talked through it, and me and Merry had come through it, stronger, happier, and more in love, on the other side. Together, we could take on anything. So it made me feel strong, and grown up, watching Merry lying flat on the bed, inspecting her stomach for signs of swelling.

But Merry's stomach remained stubbornly flat. There was no period, but neither were there any of the symptoms she said she should be expecting, no morning sickness, no swollen ankles or tender nipples. After we had been fucking without condoms for three weeks, Merry frowned and said this was probably it, since it had to have been well over a month since her last period, and went to the pharmacy. We held hands over the bathroom sink as we waited for the test results, anxiously hoping for the best, but after twenty minutes of waiting, nothing happened. The minus sign never turned to a plus. That meant it was negative. But still no period. About two weeks before I was due to go back on tour, she booked an appointment with a doctor. We had already agreed, I would do this six-month tour, but book no more after that, so I could stay home with her and wait for the baby. _Our_ baby. I felt my face light up with a manic grin every time I even thought about it.

I offered to put her on my health insurance, after all, I proudly explained, it was one of the perks of being on Musketeer, but she just looked at me as if I were stupid, and said "Danny, we had a platinum album...? I'm _rich_."

I just stared back at her, trying to take this in. It seemed such a reversal. I had got so used to the idea that I would have to take care of her, I never thought that she might be able to take care of herself.

But when she came back from inside the doctor's office, her face was crestfallen.

"What? What is it?" I demanded, trying to get her to sit down next to me in the waiting room.

"Not here," she said and walked off in silence. On the way home, she made us stop at an ice cream parlour, and ordered a double hot fudge sundae, which she insisted that I share with her. She took two or three bites, then gave up, staring down into the dish. I didn't understand. Merry had always loved ice cream, in fact, my fondest memory of our first night together was licking ice cream off each others' noses. But then she burst into tears. "Danny, the doctor says I'm too thin. I've probably stopped even ovulating because I don't have enough body fat. There's no baby, in fact, right now, it's unlikely I could even get pregnant."

"Oh..." I stared at her miserable face, not knowing what to say, but I took her hand and squeezed it, even as I felt all of our plans draining away with the melting ice cream. "So we'll fatten you up. I'll get the kitchen finished, learn to cook pasta, put some meat on your hips. It's OK, we'll try again." She tried to smile bravely, but I could tell it wasn't working. "Look, I know I'm not supposed to say this and I'm not supposed to comment on your body, but I actually rather preferred you more... curvy. I miss your ass, I miss that adorable little belly that I could kiss and rest my forehead against before I ate out your delicious little..."

That raised a smile, tiny dimples appearing each side of her mouth. I liked when she had little dimples at the bottom of her back, as well, but those were gone with the new, lean body. But the smile twisted wryly and faded into a frown. "Michael said I _had_ to lose weight. He saw my massive fucking belly hanging out in the Rolling Stone shoot, and he freaked out. He said I had to be _thin_ if I wanted to stay in the band, if I wanted to keep doing photo shoots and making videos..."

"Fuck Michael," I spat, and the weight of my anger surprised me. "What's he gonna do, sack you? Kill the fatted calf?" Unfortunate words I cursed as soon as they were out of my mouth.

"Unfatted calf, as the case may be. Too fucking skinny to menstruate fucking useless cow."

"Deltawave is Merry Wythenshawe; Merry Wythenshawe is Deltawave. He can't get rid of you. But you can get rid of him, that's for certain."

She shook her head sadly. "We can't. Legally, Deltawave is Elisha. I had no idea, but he did some deal with Michael behind my back, behind Bebe's back. He copyrighted it. He owns the name. Gabe and I don't."

"Is that even legal? After all, he didn't even come up with the name - Bebe and her brand consultants did," I fumed, remembering how I'd had to twist his arm to get him to agree to the switch, and now he was claiming he owned it?

"He copyrighted it first, behind our backs, and used that fucking Rolling Stone interview to prove that it was his group before Gabe and I joined. Then he made us sign new contracts, with Michael, saying it was just a management contract negotiating new terms - better terms, supposedly. Maybe for him! I didn't even have time to look at the small print, it was just sign this, before we start working on the second album. I just signed because I felt so backed in a corner, it really felt like, if you don't sign this, you're out of the band..."

"Merry!" I interrupted, shocked. "How many times have I told you, sign nothing without getting your lawyer to go over it?"

"I know, I know," she moaned, bunching her hair in her hands miserably. "Things were so much easier when you were still doing our A&R."

At the same time, I felt proud that she acknowledged it, pleased with the recognition of how good I'd been at my job, but also it made me feel guilty, like I'd let her down by leaving.

"It was a stitch-up, the new contract. We're officially hired players. You know, he even put us on a fucking salary. Each of us gets two hundred bucks a gig, rather than a full share of the fee plus merch. I'm alright for money, like I said, I'm rich, because I've got my name on some of the songwriting, and a share of the publishing - thanks to you, I might add - but it's so fucking unfair to Gabe. Gabe _makes_ this fucking band, and yet Elisha treats him like a session player."

"Why the fuck would he do that?" I stared down into the remains of our double fudge sundae, now a melted mess at the bottom of the bowl. "What a selfish cock! All this over the money? Surely, with a platinum album, there's enough money for all three of you to be millionaires, with spare left over!"

"It's not about the money, Danny, it's about control. Because Bebe has been pushing for me to be the frontman, and backing him into a corner. She made him dispensable with that whole _only number 36_ business. This is his way of making himself indispensable again." Bending down, she filled her spoon with the sticky mess, and raised it to her mouth, trying to force herself to swallow. "It tastes gross when it's melted. Everything tastes worse when you leave it too long." She looked up at me meaningfully through thick blonde eyelashes. "Including second albums."

"Merry...?" I didn't like the tone of her voice.

"I suppose not being pregnant means I have to go back and finish recording the second album, I guess," she said quietly.

"Finish the second album?" I repeated, suddenly realising that this whole scenario was painfully resembling the circumstances of our first near miss with pregnancy. "Have you started it?"

She shook her head slowly, solemnly, but then her mouth broke into a sheepish grin as the shake turned to a nod. "We were supposed to take two weeks' break for the holidays, but... well, as you saw. Cindy took me to that big party to try to cheer me up - 'maybe you'll meet someone new,' she told me, 'someone exciting who will make you forget all about that Danny Asheton' - ha! as if!" Her eyes glittered as she glanced up at me. "But, obviously, I gave Cindy the slip." Opening her big sea-green eyes wide, she shoved another spoon of melted goo into her mouth and swallowed.

I glared at her, half honoured that she'd considered rekindling our relationship worth screwing up her band for, but half annoyed at the thought that it wasn't even about me. She was just using our relationship to avoid her responsibilities. Again. And suddenly, I was weirdly relieved that she was not yet pregnant. "Stop eating that shit. If you're not pregnant, we're gonna get a pot of coffee. In fact, we're going to go to the Manhattan Cafe, we're going to eat a proper, full breakfast with Bloody Marys and everything, and then I'm going to ring Bebe and tell her that I have got you, and I will deliver you back to Barry - he's producing again, I assume?" She nodded solemnly. "I will deliver you back to Barry personally, myself, tomorrow morning. And since I am no longer with Windlass, and just a civilian now, I will be staying over in the studio, mostly to make sure that there is no fallout from Elisha, but also to make sure you don't pull another runner before I go on tour. Deal?"

She smiled and put the spoon down, pushing her feet towards me until we were nudging one another gently. It was almost like she wanted me to shout at her, wanted me to take her in hand and half-bully half-cajole her back to her band, like I used to do when I was her A&R. It was so easy to fall into the old patterns of our relationship, maybe too easy, but she nodded solemnly. "Deal."

I can't say I didn't feel conflicted. Like, sure, there was a part of me that was suspicious that it had been so easy - that it had been too easy - the way we fell back into each others' arms and back into each others' lives. Was it really me that she wanted, or was it just how simple and uncomplicated our life together had been before Deltawave got signed? But the other half of me protested: we fell back into those old patterns because they _worked_. Like me and Merry - her so spontaneous and unrestrained and OK, a little bit too impetuous, and me, so methodical and conscientious and, OK, a little bit scheming - together we acted like two halves of a whole person, each one supplying what the other one lacked. We complemented one another. I knew I was a better person when I was with Merry - and I wondered, just maybe, if so was she?


	26. She's Lost Control (Again)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Daniel delivers Merry back to Barry's studio at Catskills Mansions, he experiences first-hand how creative tensions have turned the internal divisions within Deltawave to almost irreconcilable fractures, and how the pressures of success have all but destroyed Merry's self esteem and easy self-assurance.
> 
> Can Daniel and Cindy put aside their differences and bury the hatchet to create a supportive "Team Merry"? Or will Elisha's behaviour start to poison even Daniel and Merry's relationship?
> 
> Content warning for the kind of hipster racism, anti-semitism and general cluelesness you've probably come to expect from Daniel by now.
> 
> Trigger warning for eating disorders.

I called Bebe later in the afternoon than I'd intended, after a long brunch, and an even longer extended session of lovemaking. But when I finally rang, I realised with a start, how long it had been since I last spoke to Bebe, and how much, oddly, I missed her.

Sherry didn't even recognise my voice, asked who was speaking. "Have you really forgotten sitting next to me for a year, Sherry, complaining about that shitty Smiths CD I played every Friday afternoon? _Frankly, Mister Shankley, this position I've held_ ," I crooned down the phone.

"Daniel Asheton! Oh my god, but aren't you a rock star now?" she teased.

"I am, but I need to speak to Bebe."

"OK, I'll put you through." The line clicked, and after a few moments, Bebe came on, sounding slightly sarcastic, but still pleased to hear from me.

"Daniel J Asheton of hot new Modern Rock property, Metropolis, Happy New Year, and how lovely to hear from you."

"Hi, Bebe. Happy New Year. I believe I have something of yours? Something that might have gone missing just before Christmas?" I ventured.

"Something blonde and bass shaped?" Bebe immediately replied. As I started to bluster, she just laughed. "I knew she was with you, Dan. Cindy told me you two left the party together. We figured, well, the two of you probably needed it. Badly."

I blushed fiercely. Christ, had I needed it. I didn't realise how not-human, how much of an automaton I had become until Merry had reappeared in my life and re-awoken all those frozen urges and frozen emotions. It was like when my band had got signed, I'd just put my heart away in an icebox only she held the key to. "Look, I have to go back out on tour again in two weeks. But I think Merry would be a lot happier if I came up to the studio with her, just for the weekend, while she settles back in."

"Hmmm," said Bebe, as if considering the prudence of this. "Look, I'll ring Barry and ask him, but I suspect he'll be fine with it - so long as you keep your little A&R nose out of Deltawave's recording process."

"I actually have a rather large and crooked nose, thank you," I mock sulked. "Some people consider it one of my better features."

Merry, sitting across the kitchen table from me, giggled, and reached out to flick the tip of my nose. I had never considered my crooked nose a positive feature until she had told me how much she had missed it.

"Save it for Merry, Loverboy. Is this your new number? I'll call you back in ten, OK."

And so, the next morning, Merry packed up her things back into her suitcase, and stuffed it back into the lumber room, and I packed a weekend bag. Then the two of us took the subway up to the Port Authority to catch a bus to Catskill. When was the last time I'd made this journey? A year and a half ago? Two years ago? I should remember this, the two-year production cycle, _record - album - tour - record_ over and over again in endless hamster wheel cycles. I let her sit by the window, and I started reading a Gide novel while she stared out into the frozen Hudson.

Cindy met us in a station wagon at the bus stop, and drove us together up the mountain to the studio, me sitting in the back so the girls could catch up. It was odd how, after a year and a half of touring, meeting all kinds of people from all walks of life at clubs, parties, strip bars, mixing with genuine crazies and drug-heads, and getting used to general sexual weirdness from Dieter and his mates, I no longer thought of Cindy as even the slightest bit odd. In fact, compared to the past few months, compared to Z-Man and PCPete and evenings with Lemmy from Motorhead in strip bars in LA, Cindy was a refreshing and familiar breath of normality. Cindy was just Cindy, Merry's best girlfriend, with whom she shared fashion tips and memories about old freestyle records from the 80s as they giggled together in the car, and who cared enough about Merry not to rat us out to Bebe until after we'd escaped the party. And remembering the awful way in which I'd once pitched a jealous fit and ranted stupid bigotry about her, I suddenly felt my face flush with shame and embarrassment.

"You alright back there, sweet pea? You've gone awfully quiet," Cindy chirped, as if she felt my eyes upon her.

"I'm alright," I replied, then impulsively leaned forward and patted her gently on the shoulder, giving her an affectionate squeeze. "Cindy, you're a lovely girl. A genuinely wonderful woman. I never got the chance to tell you this, but I'm really grateful for the way you've looked after my Merry."

Cindy pulled a face, half embarrassed half suspicious, then cackled with laughter. "Ooh, he's a charmer, isn't he, Merry: your boy-thing." I couldn't quite tell if she was being serious or sarcastic.

Turning around in the passenger seat, Merry fixed me with an odd expression, and for a moment, I thought she was going to admonish me for presuming to think of her as _mine_. But she smiled, mouthed a kiss at me, then looked back at Cindy. "I love him, OK?"

Barry's studio, when we finally arrived, up a perilously icy road that had only recently been gritted, was like another world. I had only ever seen it from the outside before, where it looked like a giant cabin, the wooden planks aged to a graceful silver, set back in the woods beside a mountain stream. There was a sheltered passageway a bit like a covered bridge between the old fashioned Colonial house where we parked and the more modern studio. It curved gracefully between the trees, clear of snow, though there were a few drifts. 

It was the smell that struck me first, the scent of pine needles hitting me like the blast of icy air as soon as I opened the car door. Further down the mountain, the trees had all been bare for winter, but up in the dell where the studio was, we were almost surrounded by a small copse of fir trees, following the path of the stream up between the peaks. Flaring my nostrils, I inhaled deeply, feeling my lungs open up as if I'd just taken a hit on my ventolin puffer, and stretched my arms over my head. How on earth could Merry have run away from this?

We entered the studio through a low room where we shed boots and coats, then emerged through into a large, open lounge with a freeform Norwegian style log fire in the centre, dotted about with sofas. On one of these lay Gabe, fiddling with a GameBoy, but he leapt to his feet when we entered.

"So you came back to us, huh?" Gabe grinned expectantly, and Merry walked over and embraced him like a long-lost brother. "And not a moment too soon. Ely's completely unbearable. Don't know how Barry and Ken cope."

"Don't," sighed Merry, as Gabe and I shook hands and nodded solemnly at one another. And I looked at Gabe in a new light, no longer just seeing the gangling drummer, but trying to imagine him as a guardian angel, rescuing Merry from a gushing head-wound in the middle of a snowstorm. I felt such a burst of affection for him, I almost wanted to throw my arms around him and hug him. But Gabe was shyer and even more reserved than I was, so I stuck to a few manly back-slaps. "Shall we go upstairs, then?" 

Gabe nodded grimly, and we went over to a polished wooden section of the wall, which swung back to reveal a staircase heading up. There was the usual double pair of sound isolation doors at the top, but I walked out into a recording studio that was unlike any other I had ever been in. For a start, there was no control room. The mixing desk was right out in the middle of the room with the musicians, the whole contraption on wheels so it could be hauled around and repositioned. Wondering where the noisy tape reels - or computer hard drives or whatever - were kept, I saw another small closet of a room at the back, behind more soundproofed glass. Barry's tape op was poking around in there, a tall, thin man with a ratty grey ponytail, wearing faded old leather trousers that looked like he might have been sleeping in them since the 70s.

The main recording room was tall, peaked like a A-frame, the high wooden ceiling providing a kind of natural reverb, though there were movable baffles that could be placed anywhere they were needed to muffle the sound. And then the other end of the room, where I would expect the outer wall of the building, there was just... nothing. The room stopped. There was a floor to ceiling expanse of glass; it had to be thermal glass of some kind, from the fact that the whole structure was reasonably warm, from just the fire downstairs. And beyond the glass was the mountain stream, the woods, mountains, and then sky. It took my breath away. So this was what a major label budget bought. I thought of the cramped, badly panelled sweathouse in which Metropolis had recorded our debut, and suddenly I wanted it. I wanted a major label budget, and I wanted a major label lifestyle.

But Elisha's voice snapped me out of my envious reverie. "Oh. Well, look what the cat's dragged in."

"Leave it out, Ely," said Merry quietly, as she walked over, and embraced Barry at the desk. "How's it going?"

"Well, it's going about as well as it could be expected, considering one of us decided to just swan off and leave the rest of us in the lurch, at however many billion dollars a day, recoupable, that this is costing us," Elisha sneered.

"My bass parts were all down before we broke for Christmas," Merry snapped back, and I could see the colour rising in her cheeks. "If anyone's been wasting time while I've been away, it's certainly not my fault."

"You know very well I can't do the harmonies without your vocals in place, Miss Lead Singer Girl," Elisha sniped.

"Just do some vamps and fucking keyboard fills, sing your backing vocals in the wrong fucking key, and drown me out, as usual, why don't you," Merry tossed back. Wow, this was way worse than Doyle and Dieter - mostly because I almost always knew that Doyle and Dieter sparred more out of a sense of competitive fun than any real hatred. Elisha and Merry, they had started to loathe one another, it was clear just to look at them. This obviously went well beyond the whole business with the contracts, it was a deep, simmering resentment, that as far as I could see, clearly went back to that fateful decision of Bebe's, to cast Merry as the lead. I had known at the time, that it would sew dissent, but if I had known exactly how much, could I have made it be known that I fought the decision, a little harder?

Physically stepping between them, I tried to play the peacemaker. "Look, she's back now. I'm sure you've got plenty done during the peace and quiet of her absence, but she's returned, and rested, and in much better shape to get back to work."

Elisha didn't even bother responding, he just stared at me with slowly narrowing eyes. "Ah. I see you brought your pet lapdog with you again," he finally observed, before turning back to his keyboard, as if he had forgotten the whole thing where I brokered them their major label fucking deal, and in point of fact, had done A&R for them for nearly a year. At that moment, regardless of any feelings of loyalty I had towards Merry, I _really fucking hated_ Elisha.

Barry sighed deeply, then flicked a few buttons on his mixing desk, powering down for the day. "Shall we break before lunch? Ken, we're gonna break for an hour or so, if you want to take the bus-board apart," he called back to the engineer, who closed the cabinet he'd been working on and waved. "I know it's a bit early, but we could do with all sitting down around the kitchen table and just... chilling."

As we walked back to the house, I took the opportunity to interrogate Barry on his unorthodox recording set-up, asking where the tapes were kept, wondering about the noise of the board automation, only to be told that there was no board automation - it was an ancient, beautifully warm, old analogue desk, and when they mixed down, it was all hands on deck to work all of the faders. Yes, it meant that a mix was both unique and final, and could never be duplicated in quite the same way if something went wrong. But it brought an unpredictable, human quality to the experience, which could never quite be replicated with automated gear. I was bursting with questions, wanting to know about the wall of vintage compressors I'd glimpsed through the glass of the tape-op room, but Barry put his arm around my shoulders in a paternal manner as we walked up the steps to the farmhouse.

"Cindy has a little rule. No shop talk in the house."

"Really? Wow, that's crazy. When we were in the studio, we pretty much ate, slept and breathed music production 24 hours a day for four weeks."

"Yeah, and I saw how crazy you and Doyle were driving each other," Merry reminded me. Then I remembered that last, weird hand-job over the gear housing of her rental car, and felt vaguely sad. "This works... better."

I was about to protest that she and Elisha barely seemed to be getting along any better, but oddly, once they were in the house, Elisha seemed to settle down and become more relaxed, disappearing off into the kitchen to offer to help Cindy with the salad she was preparing for lunch. "OK, I can see that."

"Look, Dan," offered Barry, going to the fridge and pulling out a half gallon jug of Vermont cider before offering it round. "I've heard your album, kid. You do your thing really well. You've got a great aesthetic, and you wear it well, most definitely. But when you're ready to work with a real producer, and get serious, you come to me."

"We can't afford to work with you," I said very gently, hoping that Barry would offer some deal, trade knock-down rates on his time in exchange for points on the album or something... but nothing was forthcoming, and he soon changed the subject.

And we all sat down to lunch, me and Deltawave, and Barry and Cindy, like the past year, where I had gone off and become a rock star in my own right, like that had never even happened at all.

 

After about a day and a half, I had settled into the sleepy routine of Catskills Mansion so easily that I wondered how I was ever going to go back to the frenetic pace of Metropolis. Most of the time, the place worked its magic, and the easy-going schedule focused the band during recording time, and let them unwind and step back from each others' throats during the down time. Sure, the tension inside the studio was almost unbearable at times, as if there were a dark cloud of energy sitting in the corner of the room, sucking the joy and happiness out of the room, and leaving discord and spite in its place. But after an evening or two at the farmhouse, I realised that if anything, Barry's methods were working perfectly to diffuse the tension, and if Deltawave worked the way Metropolis worked, there would be no recording at all, in fact there would be no band at all.

I liked the cosy evenings curled up in front of the fire with Merry beside me on the sofa, and a dog burrowed between us for warmth. We read books and played scrabble, though Cindy cheated terribly and sulked if we didn't let her win. Elisha disappeared to do... whatever Elisha did in the evenings, so as Merry and I climbed the stairs to our bedroom, up under the eaves in the attic, I wondered where Mandy was.

"They split up ages ago," Merry explained, with one of those where-have-you-been been shrugs. To my blank expression, she elaborated. "Elisha was messing around with a backing dancer on the Jezebel tour. It was pure fucking stupidity on his part; the affair didn't even last till the end of the tour, but the damage was done. Of course Mandy found out, and dumped him. It was pretty ugly, yeah."

_And now you've lost the person most responsible for the arresting visuals that created your band's whole aesthetic_ , I thought to myself, but thought better of saying it. But then I realised. "So we're the last."

"The last what?"

"We're the last of the Lacuna scene couples. We're the only ones that are still together. Elisha and Mandy, split up. Dick and Jessica? Finished. Doyle and Effie? She kicked him out last summer, and I don't even want to go into that, because Doyle's fucking some drug dealer called Auntie Beast now. You and me, we are the only ones to make it."

Merry sat down on the edge of the bed, which was a funny, lumpy, narrow, old-fashioned thing that sat about four feet off the floor, and stared up at me as if considering this.

"And even you and I, we were split up for, like, a year..." I added.

"I never forgot you," she said quietly. "I never stopped hoping that we would find one another, at the end of it the craziness. I asked the Universe to bring you back to me, and she did."

"Me, too, sweetie, me too." Sitting down beside her, I put my arm around her waist and squeezed, the thinness of her hips reminding me that I would have to have a word with Cindy before I left, about getting her to eat properly. Back at our loft, she had actually been eating reasonably sensibly, fresh fruit, Chinese vegetables and tofu with egg-fried rice. But up here, she was back to skipping meals and nibbling half a ricecake in place of supper.

"Look, promise me this. Don't let us do that again. Even if we can't see each other, let's just promise that we'll stay in touch, every week, at least once a week. Even if one of us doesn't hear from the other, just send a message. Just let me know you're out there. And I'll do the same for you."

"Well, that's easy when you're in the studio, but what happens when you're on tour?" I didn't like to think about it, really.

"Look, I've got email now. Proper, web-based email, on Hotmail, so that no matter where in the world I am, I can log on through a browser and collect it. So no excuses. You email me, I email you. Every week. I do not want to fucking lose touch with you like that again. I daw you too much."

Email. It seemed so simple now that she mentioned it, I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it before. But email, to me, still seemed like something bound to a computer, bound to a desk, something I only went to check when I physically went to my sister's apartment, or into the Windlass offices. Could two people keep a relationship going, using only email and the will to stay together? "Web mail? You'll have to show me."

"Well, that's a first," she laughed, her eyes wide with amazement.

"What is?"

"I used to think you knew everything, Danny Asheton. It's kind of a surprise to find out that you don't." And with a frisky laugh, she kicked off her shoes and climbed into bed. And I clicked off the light and slipped into bed on top of her, startled by the dark of a rural night, but pleased to find her body ready and waiting for me as I started to make love to her.

 

I put off leaving for as long as I could, even though I knew I still had to get home, and pack, and sort out the rest of the logistical shit for a six-month tour, and arrange for my sister to drop by the apartment once a week and water my plants. I didn't want to leave Merry. I didn't want to leave Cindy and the warm kitchen and the home-cooked meals, either. But I did have a private word with Cindy before I left, instructing her to make sure that Merry ate properly.

"It's that fucking Michael," Cindy sighed, rolling her eyes to indicate what she thought of the whole thing. "He calls her fat, and then she goes on a Kale leaf and vitamin pill diet for two weeks, until she's so weak she can barely stand up. And you know... have you seen Michael?"

I shook my head as I munched one of her breadsticks, realising that I had only ever spoken to this mysterious entity, this "creature" of Elisha's, over the phone.

"Honey, now, Michael, is fat. Michael is pushing 300 lbs in Big And Tall Men's Outlet relaxed fit jeans. But he looks at Merry with an ounce of extra body fat on her, and he freaks out and tells her to go on a diet."

I frowned, and found myself wondering if I could have some private word with Bebe to try to get rid of Michael, then had to remind myself mentally that I was Merry's partner - fiancé, maybe, even, though she hadn't mentioned marriage again since that awful afternoon at the doctor - and not her A&R any more. "Look, it's really important that Merry gets healthy again. Not just for her sake, but for the sake of our..." And then I stopped myself, I thought just in time, but Cindy narrowed her eyes at me.

"Is there something you're not telling me, Asheton?"

I sighed deeply, knowing she was never going to let me off the hook once she got wind of a story. "OK, we've been trying for a baby," I finally admitted, and it felt like such a wash of relief to actually let it out there in the world, like this made it a real thing, that could actually happen. Merry and I were in love, we wanted to get married, and we were trying for a baby like any normal young couple.

"Honey, Michael is never going to let a baby happen. This band has an album to record, and then a tour which is already booked and organised and has too much fucking money riding on it to ever let a baby come in the way of it." Her eyes seemed veiled, maybe even suspicious. I could never quite shake the feeling that Cindy just didn't _like_ me.

"And Merry and I are in love, and have the rest of our lives to consider. And we want a big family, so we better get started soon." We? It was me that wanted a big family, all the brothers and sisters I'd never had, growing up, that I'd tried to turn Doyle and Dieter and Dick into, over the years. "Or, at least... well, we would if we could get her weight back to a normal range." Suddenly I felt more than slightly angry at this unseen Michael. "I mean, I don't even get it. Merry looks so much better with a bit of weight on her, bringing out her dimples. But do you think she listens to me, the guy who loves her, adores her more than anyone else in the world? No, she listens to this Michael asshole."

Cindy's suspicious look gave way to a bittersweet smile. "Oh, honey, you don't really get it, do you? Merry's eating thing... it isn't just about how she looks. It's about control. I have known so many girls in this industry, come down with eating disorders, one after another, beautiful, slim girls, with bodies to die for. They get in this business, with managers, and A&Rs and producers and everyone shouting at them, do this, do that, be this, be that, and their lives aren't even their own for years at a time. You can't control what the charts do, you can't even control what your own rat-bastard of a bandmate is gonna do. But if you can control your body, that means you control something."

"I know all about Elisha... she did tell me." I clenched my fists, just wanting to punch the whole lot of them, Elisha and Michael and maybe even Bebe for letting it happen. "If I'd been here... if I'd still been with her, reading her contracts, doing her A&R..."

"Oh, Daniel, you can't blame yourself for that. I know you, you're in the same fucking whirlpool - though I don't even want to know, what it is you try to exert your little sphere of control over." Her eyes slid up and down my chest, my perfect black suit, the Dior tie I'd reclaimed from Merry, the hair I struggled to bash into submission to look as good as it had looked in LA. "Merry has no control over this band, or her life, or the impossible demands Michael makes of her. But the one thing she can control, is her weight."

"By starving herself?" My hand went almost reflexively to my throat, to straighten my tie. I felt so powerless. "How do I help her, Cindy?"

Cindy sighed deeply, then reached out to pat me gently on the shoulder. "She needs just one place in her life where she feels safe, where she feels in control and in charge of her own life. As far as I can tell, she always viewed her relationship with you as that safe place."

"Yeah," I sighed, and I felt suddenly embarrassed, remembering all the jealous fits I'd pitched, how insecure and neurotic and possessive I'd been in the past. I resolved, yet again to never, ever be that dude again, if I could possibly help it. "Merry always has been the one taking the lead, in this relationship. She always took control." I paused, remembering her standing on that cold balcony in Brooklyn, blurting out a blunt proposition I hadn't had the guts to ask. I found it reassuring the way Merry always took control; that made me feel safe. "And I kinda like it that way."

Pulling a wry face, Cindy studied me carefully, then slowly started to smile, a look of approval I'd never seen on her face before. "You know, I may have underestimated you, Dan. After your disappearing act, I spent a year trying to encourage Merry to get over you, even introducing her to other guys..."

"I knew it," I muttered under my breath, secretly blaming her for the whole Peter Book thing. But then I relented slightly. After I'd acted like such a bigot towards her, who could blame her for being suspicious of me?

"...when really I should have been ringing Musketeer finding out the cell phone number of your tour manager, and sending Merry off to the next date of _your_ tour."

"We don't even have a tour manager," I snapped, feeling cross to be reminded once again of all the ways in which we were somehow inferior to Dead Letters. Cindy was never going to take me seriously, was she? Not really. "We have me. It's all me. In fact, I shouldn't even be here, I should be back down in NYC, ringing our booking agent, confirming our bus hire with the rental company, sorting out six months of tour support with Gerry... But instead, I'm up here, trying to take care of my girlfriend." Suddenly I felt very guilty, like Merry was not the only one who used our relationship to avoid the responsibilities of our bands.

"Hang on, sweet pea," interrupted Cindy. "You guys are touring at a national level, and you have no tour manager? Are you insane? Honey, let me get on the blower! It's not like Gerry can't afford it..." She went into her office to fetch a filofax, then picked up the phone. "Hey, Tony! It's Cindy here... Yeah, we're good, we're good, how's tricks...?" A pause as an insect buzz droned in her ear. "Look, Tony, don't sign that contract just yet. Tell Swerve and their asshole guitarist to get fucked. I found another job for you..."

My ears pricked up as I heard Cindy and this Tony fellow picking over the details of Swerve's impossible demands, then slowly I started to feed the information of our own next tour - dates, booking agent, logistics - through Cindy to this unknown man.

Finally, Cindy laughed and handed the phone across to me. "I think you two should really talk, this could work out well for both of you."

"Look, are you sure you can do this at such short notice?" I asked nervously, wondering if we could afford this guy, in fact, if this guy was even available for the dates we needed. "I do understand that it's really kinda last minute..."

"Hot damn," said a broad Brooklyn accent at the other end of the line. "If you can save me from having to sign up for this fucken' Swerve tour, I am yours tomorrow. In fact, I am yours yesterday!"

"Hot _damn_ ," I agreed, thinking that was definitely some kind of good omen. "Let me take your details, and I'll get on the phone to Gerry, and get you on board." If this guy could pick up even some of the slack of dealing with touring, I would be in Cindy's debt forever. Not to mention how it would free me up to spend the rest of the week up in the mountains with Merry. Now I had found her again, I was loathe to ever let her go.

 

\----------

 

In the studio, I was learning so much from Barry I suspected I really ought to have helped pay for the session. Although I had volunteered to help Old Ken out as an extra engineer, adjusting mic placements to Barry's or Ken's direction and disappearing into the tape op room to adjust compressors, it was more like a week-long apprenticeship. I had thought I knew my way around a studio, and I was proud of the production job I had done on the first Metropolis record, with only minimal suggestions from Terry. But Barry revealed that there were whole worlds I'd never even considered, and Ken, wow, what Old Ken didn't know about music equipment would not have fit on the back of a guitar plectrum.

Even when they scrapped, Elisha and Merry were just so far ahead of anything Metropolis were doing, both in terms of arrangements and technology. Elisha and Gabe had rigged up whole sections of programmed arrangements for the drums, weird loops that Gabe could trigger with a pad, and then play against a looped version of himself. And Merry had some strange vibrating thing that she held against the high strings of her 6-string bass, turning it into a cello, a theremin, some weird wailing synth sound, especially when she used a bottleneck slide on her fretting fingers.

"What on earth is that?" I asked, entranced.

"It's an ebow. You know, everyone from Love and Rockets to Dead Letters used to use them back in the 80s."

"Do they make them for the guitar?" I wondered, scratching my chin thoughtfully as I wondered at the possibilities.

"They're made for the guitar. Don't really work properly on bass strings, to be honest. Here, you try..."

I took both bass and ebow, and started mucking about on the higher strings like Peter Book, rewarded with that eerie, wailing late-80s Dead Letters sound. "Wow, this is... Wow."

"You're hooked, aren't you?" Merry giggled. "You're so cute when you're falling in love with a guitar sound."

And so I played it on the record, just one riff with an ebow on her 6-string bass, but still, it made me feel special, like she trusted me, to leave a mark on her record. (Just so long as I got a credit for it.)

But when Elisha heard about it, he hit the roof. He didn't care how good it sounded, he didn't care how the haunting, ethereal eBow solo fit the mood of the record, the moment he even heard that I was playing on his record, he wanted me off it, and wanted to duplicate my fucking solo with his synths. Barry told him that was a bad idea, that the track was already locked in and mixed down, and he wasn't going to re-set the board. But Elisha persisted, throwing a hissy fit, and even storming out of the studio, until I decided I'd had enough and chased him down the stairs and out into the snow, to find him huddling under the covered walkway, trying to light a cigarette.

"Dude, what the fuck is your problem?" I finally exploded.

Elisha rounded on me, his eyes blazing. "What the fuck is _my_ problem? What the fuck are you even doing at this session anyway? You're not our fucking A &R any more, and thank god for that."

Ignoring the slur against my A&R capabilities, I went on the attack. "You wouldn't even be having a session right now if it weren't for me dragging Merry back up here."

"I'm not sure that would be such a great tragedy," Elisha sneered, in direct contradiction of what he'd claimed the day Merry walked back in. "Besides, if it wasn't for you, she wouldn't have gone AWOL in the first place. Do you do it on purpose? You've always been jealous of my band, Asheton, because we are so much better and more successful than Metropolis. So now you think, after seducing away our bass player, that you can just worm back into our circle?" With this withering bon mot delivered, he took a contemptuous drag of his cigarette, then turned and walked away from me.

"No, Elisha, I don't think you get it. It wasn't me that seduced Merry away. You _drove_ her away," I shouted after him. Actually, the hell with it. If I wasn't their A &R any more, I didn't have to hold back or be tactful any more. I wanted to have this out, following him down the path as I ranted. "What the fuck is wrong with you, man? You're right. You guys _are_ more successful than Metropolis, way more successful. You guys have had a number one record, a tour with Jezebel, you're on the cusp of major fucking stardom, and yet I have never met any musician so intent on destroying the exact things that everybody loves about your band. First you drive off Mandy, who was responsible for creating your whole look and aesthetic, and now you're trying to drive off Merry, who is responsible for your _sound_? Why are you such an asshole about sharing credit and sharing money? Why can you just not sit back, and share the spotlight with Merry?"

Cornered in a little windbreak at the end of the path, Elisha rounded on me. "She doesn't just want to share the spotlight, she wants to take the whole spotlight for herself. She doesn't want half the credit, she wants the credit for _everything_."

"You know that's just not true, Ely."

"It's what Bebe wants, it's what Windlass wants, and I swear to god it's what Barry wants, too. Constantly bigging her up in the studio and subtly tearing me down."

"You're projecting. I've been in the studio with you guys. That's what _you_ do, you constantly tear her down. If Barry is bigging her up, it's to try to restore the self esteem you seem to be so carefully and systematically destroying." I had wondered where Merry's characteristic confidence and easy self-assurance had gone over the past year, and now I fucking knew.

"Bullshit." Elisha sucked at his cigarette hungrily, then dashed it to the ground, crushing it beneath his heel.

"What's bullshit is the way that you are wrecking your own band, in order to gratify... I don't even know what! Your own fucking ego?"

Folding his arms across his chest, Elisha eyed me dismissively. "How old are you, Asheton? You're what, 25?"

"26," I corrected.

"I am 37 years old, Dan. Yeah, don't look so surprised, I lied on my press kit and knocked off a few years; everybody does. I have been in this industry, playing gigs, writing songs, since you were in kindergarten. Literally. This is my last chance, this band. And this is _my_ band, and don't you ever forget it. Your little buddies, Merry and Gabe, were a hired rhythm section, remember? I have been working on this, honing my skills as a songwriter, for my entire life. I have been preparing for this, for 22 years. And you think I am going to hand over my big chance, my one and only shot at the brass ring, just give it to some jumped-up little window-dressing of a session player with nice tits and pretty hair, who only started writing songs 6 months ago, to impress some boy she used to fuck? Are you fucking kidding me?"

I stared at him, utterly flabbergasted. Like, I did not even know where to begin, with a statement of that colossal magnitude of utter wrongness. When I didn't immediately reply, Elisha shrugged, pointedly, then pushed past me, rudely elbowing me out of the way, not even looking back at me as he made his way up to the house. For a long minute, I stared after him, just trying to get my head around his motivations. It was hard for me to believe that someone who was so close, who had so much at stake on this project, could be so wilfully self destructive about it. I knew things had got bad with Elisha, but I'd no idea they'd got this bad. But as the cold permeated my bones, I turned the opposite direction and headed back to the studio.

I came back upstairs to find Barry and Merry and Gabe all crowded round the mixing desk, listening to one of Merry's haunting backing vocals reverberating around the room like a hungry ghost. How on earth could anyone hear her voice, and think that Elisha could better it? Kneeling down beside her chair, I snaked my arm around her shoulders and kissed her cheek tenderly.

"You sound amazing," I told her.

She accepted my kiss, but frowned. "Nah, Barry's right. It's slightly flat in the second half of the chorus. Can we punch it in?"

"Not on a vocal. You'll get a pop," warned Barry.

"I'll do another take then," she volunteered and cheerfully got up to walk back to the vocal isolation booth, picking up the headphones and adjusting them over her hair.

"I don't know how she does it," I said softly, suddenly glad of the soundproof glass between us. "The things that Elisha just said to me, outside, hot damn, I am never going to repeat those things to Merry, that he said behind her back, but.... That guy! Seriously, that fucking guy!"

Gabe shrugged, turning to look at me, his eyebrows knitted with concern. "Daniel, you know, man... those things he says to you? He says those things to her face."

I took a step back, looked at Gabe, then turned and looked at my girlfriend, and turned back to Gabe to see him still frowning at me. Insecurity suddenly shook me. "Do you resent my being back here, too?"

Gabe shook his head with an alacrity that reassured me. "No way, man. Merry is always a hundred times happier and calmer when you're around. I'm glad you're back together." He flashed me a quick grin. "And I trust you. You played us straight when you were at Windlass. And you have always been Team Merry, and that makes you Team Gabe in this game."

I turned back to the booth, and looked at Merry, fiddling with the headphones, singing nonsense phrases into the microphone so that Barry could get a line check, and resolved to myself: I was going to be Team Merry like never before.

 

\----------

 

But of course, wouldn't you know it, just on the last night, a fucking fight. I hated the way Merry and I always seemed to do this, picking on one another as if trying to drive the other one to anger just before leaving.

It was Elisha's fault, really. He had been an absolute brat all day in the studio. Since he and Merry were trying to cut vocals together at the same time, playing off one another's voices, Old Ken had set up two iso booths made from soundproof plexiglass panels in the main room. Merry had wanted to look out the window as she sang. She said it helped her stay calm, so Ken moved the two booths next to one another, both facing out the window. But Elisha had insisted that he stand opposite her, so he could watch her mouth to get cues, and re-positioned himself right in front of her, between her mic and the window. Apart from annoying Merry, it had knocked holes in Barry's mic choices, as he was using stand-up mics with a figure-8 sensitivity, and he had to swap them for cardoids. They lost over an hour, moving the booths, swapping the mics, re-testing the levels, before they finally came up with a solution whereby Merry could look out the window, Elisha could look at Merry, and it produced no bleed-through on the mics. All for a 3-minute vocal overdub.

So Merry was exhausted and slightly fractious as we retreated back to our bedroom after lunch so I could pack.

"It's fine, we all know what it's like," I assured her, looking around under the bed to retrieve one of my wandering socks. "I go through exactly the same shit with Dieter in the studio."

"Oh, come on, I know Dieter's a pretentious ass, but he's nowhere near as bratty as Elisha." Merry had flopped back on the bed, legs folded across the knee, the suspended foot jiggling back and forth in time to some imaginary rhythm in her head as she tapped out a bassline with two fingers against her own hip.

"No, they're two peas in a pod, Elisha and Dieter. Both bratty, spoiled Jewish kids who think the world revolves around them." I found the sock down among the dust bunnies and retreated back from under the bed to find my girlfriend staring at me. "What?"

"Elisha's not Jewish. Where on earth did you get that idea?"

"With a name like Elisha Diamond?"

"Stage name. Elisha _Diarmuid_ ," she informed me, before spelling out his real surname. "Is the son of a baptist minister from Tennessee."

"My mistake," I shrugged, folding up my last clean button-down shirt and laying it at the top of my suitcase before closing it. I would have to get the rest of them laundered overnight before I left on tour. "Easy mistake to make. Cause he sure acts like a spoiled Jewish kid from the Upper West Side." I had certainly known enough of them at Collegiate.

Merry's foot had stopped its twitching, and she was now glaring at me. "What was _that_?"

"What was what?" I looked around nervously, wondering if she'd noticed something that I had omitted to pack.

"Acts like a spoiled _Jewish_ kid from the Upper West Side," she repeated.

Suddenly I felt caught, as if in a vice. She always did this, seized on some casual comment I'd let drop and tried to twist it into a thing. And it was never about me, it was always about her feeling upset and annoyed about something else. I mean, why was she even defending Elisha in the first place? The guy was a total dick to her. "No, come on, Merry, let's not do this. You know what I meant - or maybe you don't. You didn't grow up on the Upper West Side, I did. Lots of spoiled, rich, over-entitled kids, whose parents buy them everything they ever want. I grew up around these people, you didn't. It's not about religion at all, so I'm not being anti-semetic or whatever you're about to accuse me of."

"So if it's not about religion, why even bring that up? You never mention Blandford Lanning's religion when you're complaining about him?"

"I don't even know what Blandford Lanning's religion even is!" I protested, which was a lie, as we'd both gone with our families to the same high Anglican Church of England services during our teens. "And just for once, can we just part on good terms, without descending into a flaming row about what a bigot you think I am."

Merry took a deep breath, then sighed long-sufferingly. "Don't do this."

Sitting down on the bed beside her, I tried to take her hand. "That's exactly what I'm saying."

"No, Dan, I'm saying don't do this again. Don't make out like you're the injured party, because I've pointed out the prejudiced assumptions in something you've said."

"Why do you even care so much?" I was rapidly moving from mildly irritated to really riled now. "It doesn't matter to me if Elisha is black, white, Jewish or purple. You're the one making a big deal of it."

"There you go again! You're infuriating..."

"What, are you calling me a racist for saying something _anti_ -racist now? Really, you are totally over-sensitive on this issue and I've no idea why."

"I'm an immigrant," she said quietly. "I am very obviously an immigrant the moment I open my mouth and show my accent..."

"So am I," I pointed out helpfully. "I was born in London, too, you know. And you don't see me complaining about how hard immigrants have it, or shouting 'racism' at anti-British sentiments."

She carried on as if she hadn't even heard me. "...though when we signed with Windlass Records, all three of us had to register with your payroll department for tax purposes, but you only asked for Gabe's Green Card."

"Gabe's from fucking Cameroon, of course I had to ask for his Green Card."

"Gabe actually has an American passport. He was born on 53rd Street, when his parents were working for the UN. Gabe's legally more American than I am, but you didn't ask for my Green Card. I had to go and take it down to HR myself."

"I already knew _your_ immigration status," I protested. "I've met your Mum, for fucks sake."

"You don't see any difference in the way that you treat me, and the way that you treat Gabe - or Cindy?" Her voice was quiet again, but it was clear that she was still mad.

"Yeah, of course I do. I'm not banging Gabe - or Cindy," I quipped, trying to win back her good graces with humour, but it didn't work. Rolling away from me on the bed, she stared out the window and sighed deeply. 

"Stop making a fucking joke of everything!"

"What else am I supposed to do? Christ, the way you pick at me, it's like you think I'm an idiot. I'm not stupid, Merry, and I don't see why you pick at me constantly, when you never call out, y'know... Dieter or anyone else, for the same shit. I mean, you think I'm racist, you should meet some of Dieter's fucking friends," I countered, remembering that awful woman at his Christmas party, snorting coke like it was going out of style, while complaining that the building's Dominican superintendent 'brought drugs and crime' into the neighbourhood. I mean, that was fucking racism, if she wanted to see _real_ racism, not me slagging off her spoiled keyboard player.

"Dieter is so obviously an attention-seeking troll, it's not worth countering him, because I don't actually believe he means a word of what he says, he only does it to rile people up. But with you, I really worry sometimes, that you actually mean it."

" _Mean_ it? Do you think I'm actually stupid?"

"I know that you're not stupid, Danny. And that's what's so frustrating about you. It's totally obvious that you're really fucking clever, like, a metric shit-ton cleverer than most of the people around you. Even Dieter and Doyle, I mean, they may be intellectual, but they're not _clever_ like you are. But you're like one of those really smart kids who never quite figured out that being really clever is not an excuse for, y'know, just _Not Being An Asshole_."

Not Being An Asshole? Christ. She had no idea how much of my life I spent trying to Not Be An Asshole! Tact and graciousness and Machiavellian diplomacy did not come naturally to me; I had to work on it constantly. Could she not see that? Why was she being such a pain about this? Taking her by the hand, I played with her silver rings, twisting them round and round on her fingers. Right, this required another tack. Whenever Merry was mad, the easiest thing to do was just make a blanket apology. "OK, whatever it is I'm supposed to have done, I'm sorry." She yanked back her hand.

But then a moment later, she sat up and wrapped her arms around my waist, laying her head in my lap and squeezing me, tight. "I don't even want to fight with you right now. As annoying and frustrating and infuriating as you are, I don't want you to go. And I _really_ don't want you to just disappear again once you go off on tour. Not like last time."

I bent down, laying my head against her hair, smoothing it down with my hand as I moved my lips against her, feeling relieved that I'd finally been forgiven for whatever the hell I was supposed to have done wrong. "I promise I won't. I'm Team Merry forever. Email every week. No matter what."


	27. Shoot Speed Kill Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another kinda scrap-booky chapter, as Metropolis hit the road again. This time, the boys are touring in style, as they can now afford a tour manager, and a tourbus, and Daniel now has a gadget that enables him to sustain his tour romance.
> 
> However, the dark side of fame starts to rear its ugly head as an insidious influence has crept onto the tourbus with their new entourage: narcotics are starting to be a serious problem within the band. Incompatible drug habits lead to personal tensions as one of them takes to coke, one to speed and one dabbles in smack. Can you guess who will go off the rails first?
> 
> Content warning for sustained drug abuse (obviously) but also violence.

I got back to NYC in the nick of time for rehearsals, only to find that while I'd hired a tour manager without them, Dieter and Doyle had hired a touring keyboard player without me. And not just any touring keyboard player, but PCPete, who used to play keyboards in Dieter's teenage Industrial band.

"You cannot be serious," I exploded as I turned up at the tour rehearsal to find PCPete already ensconced. "Whose idea was this? I did not approve this."

Dick pointed deliberately at Dieter, who shrugged nonchalantly. "It was my idea. But we voted on it. He was approved two to one."

I looked back and forth between Doyle and Dick. The former squirmed; the latter rolled his eyes. I knew which way that vote had gone. "Yeah, and if I had been here, it would have been two against, and he would not have been hired."

"Well, you weren't here," Dieter countered, his eyes flashing. "We did _try_ to get hold of you, but you were Upstate. With Deltawave, I presume, because every time Miriam Wythenshawe walks into your life, you seem to stop caring about your own band."

I glared at him, but really, there was nothing I could counter that with. I had indeed spent most of the past month in bed with Merry, dodging my bandmates' phone messages. Casting around for another excuse, I lamely protested "But he hasn't even rehearsed with us."

"He has," protested Doyle, blinking slowly, his pupils looking kinda fucked. "He's been staying with us at Fancy Delancey, and has been rehearsing with us every day. It's sounding really good."

"I'll be the judge of that," I snapped, staring across the rehearsal room at the stranger. Although he'd been cleaned up, his hair cut into an approximation of the fringes that Doyle and Dieter sported, and stuffed into a suit, those wild eyes still made him look just completely wrong for Metropolis. He merely smiled back at me in a really passive, ingratiating way that somehow bothered me more than if he'd snarled back at me, or tried to defend himself. Like, somehow the fact that he was trying to make me like him only made me revile him more. "Besides, he's called PCPete. That's can't be good."

"It's just a nickname from when I lived in London," PCPete explained placidly. "My friends all thought I was a Narc coz of how I dress. It's a Brit thing, PC - Police Constable. PC Pete. We can be PC Pete and DCI Dieter. Like we're cops."

"The Fashion Police," snickered Doyle, across the room.

I narrowed my eyes and didn't quite believe it, but, given half the band were British, I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. But when we started to play, it was actually fine, the keyboards filling out the extra bits on the album cuts that we had never quite been able to replicate live. Even Dick agreed that live keyboards suited our sound, and I found myself, yet again, outvoted and outmanoeuvred in my own band. So PCPete stayed, and even moved into the tourbus that Tony had talked Musketeer into hiring for this leg of the tour, now that we were headliners.

Tony, oh god, Cindy's mate Tony turned up with a full toolkit of useful shit, including even a cellphone, like hot damn, how much easier was touring going to be with a cellphone? He came up to my loft and took a look at all my binders, full of phone numbers and contracts and stubs of receipts for hotel rooms we'd stayed in once, then shook his head and just took a few important bits before thrusting the rest back at me. "Don't worry about a thing," the tall, lanky, restless dude told me, with almost boundless energy. "I am gonna take care of all this shit from now on. You guys just worry about getting on the bus, and getting onstage. I handle the rest."

"You shouldn't joke about that," I told him. "I can take care of myself, but the rest of my band - man, Dieter will try to have you wiping his ass within a couple of days."

Tony smirked and winked at me. "I, personally, know the PA whose job it once was to blow coke up Fleetwood Mac's asses. So if you want me to hire someone to paper your bass-player's butt? Sheeeeeit, I got that nonsense covered."

With faint nostalgia, I recalled the nerves and anticipation with which we'd departed for our very first tour, but now it felt more like just putting on a suit and hopping on the tourbus to go to work. Our tourbus, man. Hot damn, it was a beautiful beast, shiny silver, almost half the length of a city block, paid for out of what we were all starting to call 'the KROQ money' as the fourth single from _Lighs! Camera! Action!_ had been playlisted, and the album had started to sell all over again. In the front, there was a passenger seating area with a couple of tables, a little kitchenette and a bathroom with actual running water. In the back were eight bunkbeds. We needed the extra space, as Tony had recruited his mate Ronnie to hump our gear for us, so between the pair of them and Simon our soundman, we now had an actual Road Crew. The new bus had huge, cavernous storage areas underneath our bunks that swallowed all of our amplifiers whole, and locked up tight as a bank. I paced the length of the central passage, and realised the thing was bigger than my old apartment back on Ludlow Street! As I waited for the rest of my band, I tried out every seat to decide which one would become mine, and eventually bagsied the one with the table, about halfway back, from which I could see the video player, but could also keep an eye on the door to see who was coming and going.

The tourbus had parked up just off Canal Street, at the foot of my building, as that was where our equipment had been stored over Christmas, but I didn't even have to touch so much as an amp! Like a well-oiled machine, our new road crew took the gear down in the freight elevator and stowed it away under the bus in a matter of minutes. So I sat by the driver - hot damn, the bus even came with its own dedicated driver! - and waited for my bandmates to appear. 

Dick turned up first, his trilby jammed down over his eyes against the wind. He nodded brisky at me, said "Nice bus, boss!" then climbed up onto it, rubbing his hands against the cold.

Dieter and PCPete arrived next, the pair of them stalking down the street in their long black leather coats like a pair of vultures, cackling to themselves as they climbed onto the bus. Then, after an uncharacteristic wait, Doyle and Auntie Beast finally rounded the corner. With a display of affection that frankly rather embarrassed me, they finally parted, and Auntie Beast slunk back off towards Delancey, as apparently she was house-sitting for Dieter and Doyle while we were away. I didn't quite understand why - it wasn't even her epithet (she refused to divulge her real name, apparently even to Doyle) or her odd ugliness that disturbed me - but she made my skin crawl, and I avoided her like a bad debt.

Doyle, however, was in a weird mood, retreating immediately to his bunk and crashing, refusing to be woken until the evening, when we finally arrived in Amherst, a college town where we were massive, for the first night of the tour. When he finally emerged, his face was puffy and his eyes looked swollen. He looked like hell, and refused to eat, but when pressed on it, he shook his head and muttered something about coming down with the flu. We played the show, and despite the time off, the four - well, five now - of us clicked, and I felt a rush of adrenaline as soon as I hit the stage, dancing my heart out to this music, which I had thought I never wanted to hear again, but the moment my fingers formed the chords, my heart took flight and soared.

Again, Doyle disappeared immediately after the show, though the way that Dieter and PCPete closeted themselves up at the aftershow, their voices growing steadily louder and more hysterical, I suspected that Doyle had the right idea, and retreated to the tourbus myself.

When Tony rounded up Dieter and PCPete, and returned them to the bus late at night, with a couple of girls in tow, I decided to leave them to the lounge, and retreated to my own sweet, sweet bunkbed, relieved that each of us finally had a private space of our own. I was never going back to touring in a fucking van. There really was something soothing about being able to pull a curtain shut, and blot out the sight of my bandmates. And I had discovered, much to my joy, that, with my pair of headphones, I could listen to CDs on my laptop. So I put on a mix that Merry had burned for me, all Brian Eno and Cluster and minimal German synth stuff, and drifted off.

My laptop! Man, this truly was living in the future. The day I'd got back to NYC, I'd called my sister, asking if she knew about this webmail thing, and how I could get it while on the road. She had taken me down to J&R Computer World and persuaded me to buy this beauty of a streamlined little Compaq laptop. Hot damn, it set me back about a thousand dollars, which was more than I'd ever thought I'd pay for anything in my life, short of maybe a guitar. But this little baby, my Sis told me, had the same power as that massive computer that she kept in her spare room, but I could set it on my knees and use it anywhere - on the bus, in hotels, backstage at gigs. Pris even persuaded me to buy a card she called a "modem" - something that acted like a phone for my computer, that just slotted into a slit in the back, then plugged straight into a phone line.

Before I'd left New York, she'd signed me up with a personal Compuserve account, complete with a 1-800 number I could dial from anywhere in the Continental US. Merry had set me up with a Hotmail account, and shown me how I could check my email through it so I could access it from anywhere in the world. It _was_ possible to maintain a relationship while on the road, I soon discovered to my delight, but only if I was not hopelessly running myself ragged, trying to hold down three conflicting jobs of guitarist, tour manager and band manager. Between Tony and the laptop, I can't even tell you how much more pleasant touring was, when I was emailing love-notes to my girlfriend down the internet, instead of shouting at gig promoters down a hotel's phone.

When I woke, we were in Boston. Tony had booked us a day room at a hotel so that we could shower and change before the gig - I mean, what a genius idea! I had no idea that hotels would even let you do that, and at a steep discount, too - but Doyle still did not emerge from his bunk. Bending down as he passed the compartment, Dieter knocked on the wall above the bed. "Wake up call for Billy S. Burroughs!" he shouted into the curtain.

"Fuck off," snorted Doyle, but at least this time, he pulled back the curtain, though his puffy face was still only starting to resemble his normal athletic self again.

"Are you going to be alright?" I asked. "I can ask Tony to pick you up some Robitussun or something, if you're not going to be alright for the gig."

"You really think it's the flu?" Dieter cackled, pulling his leather coat around him and calling PCPete to his heel. "And not the 4-day sex and smack binge that he and Auntie Beast went on just before the tour, like a bargain basement Sid and Nancy?"

"Fuck off, at least I didn't spend two days in NYU Medical Centre with a septicaemic cock from a dirty Prince Albert piercing," Doyle tossed back, rolling out of bed.

"You _what_..." I blurted out, then decided I really didn't want to know. I retreated to our hotel day room to discuss tour plans with Tony and find a phone jack for my laptop so that I could dash off an email to Merry.

A laptop, a tour manager and a tourbus, what a difference they made. This was going to be the best tour ever. After a week or two of living like this, I could hardly believe that we had ever actually managed to criss-cross the country so many times in the back of those awful vans. Had Doyle and Dick really pulled late-night driving shifts after playing gigs, instead of enjoying a beer followed by a bunk? Watching movies and drinking fresh-brewed tea as the bus hurtled between Detroit and Chicago - how had we ever tolerated anything else? Dieter was no longer quite so irritating, even now he had a sidekick he seemed determined to turn into a miniature version of himself, when there was private space for me to retreat to, without having to listen to that honking voice holding forth, babbling on non-stop art or music or philosophy until way into the night.

And after about a week or two on the road, Doyle actually started to turn back into himself. The weird puffiness fell away as he started taking care of himself again, doing sit-ups in the corridor then counting pull-ups on the bar over the stairs down to the exit of the bus. He and I started to bring our guitars on the bus between gigs, because after a year of touring the first album, we were desperate to work on some new material. So we wrote songs in the front lounge, me bouncing riffs off him as he scratched rough poetry in a battered moleskin.

Writing songs... like, how on earth could I tell you what writing a song is like? It wasn't like you'd think, not like deciding to sit down and write a letter to my aunt, thanking her for the birthday socks. It was more like something that just happened to me. Like, I opened up a door in my head, tuned into a radio station, and there they were, the notes just floating out there in the ether, and all I had to do is write them down. In some ways, it was harder to turn the radio station off, and _not_ write songs than it was to just let them work their way into my head when I least expected them. It was like, little phrases, little noises, the distinctive squeak of the tourbus door, the weird rhythm of Dieter's shoelaces banging against the metal studs in his shoes, they just stuck in my head and turned into a melody. Someone would say something to me, like, the way Tony always rapped his fingers down the length of my bunkbed in the morning, and called out " _Dan_ -iel, time to get up now, time to rise and shine, boys" and the phrase would start repeating in my head, and after 3 or 4 or maybe even 10 or 12 repetitions, it became a phrase I could play on the guitar, like, 'Durr-dur, deedle-deedle durrr, deedle-deedle durr,' the melody arching up away from me as my fingers hit the fretboard.

And I'd just be sitting there in the lounge with my guitar, playing that phrase over and over, hearing the whole arrangement in my head, the bassline underneath, the drums coming in like... boom-ba boom ba-ba, and humming the melody of where the chords would go. That's when Doyle would catch me, and sit down with his own guitar going, "Come on, come on" and start playing along, weaving chords underneath what I was playing, and pulling out words to go with them. Sometimes he said the words just came to him, based on whatever I was doing, and other times, he'd go digging through his little moleskin notebook. But there was, like, this synergy that happened if he has a good lyric ready to go, because he'd tell me the words, saying "Yeah, but the chorus is..." And even as he spoke them aloud, kind of chanting rhythmically, I could hear the tune of how it should go, and I'd start picking out the melody on the guitar. That would make him sing along instead of just speaking, sometimes correcting me, like "No, that bit should go down, not up". When he sung, I could hear the whole thing more clearly, the arrangement fleshing out in my head, and suddenly there's this whole new song, this piece of music that never existed before in the world, until Doyle and I sat down to play.

It was magic, it really was. It was the closest thing to actual magic that I had ever known. And even after I'd done it a hundred, two hundred times, it never lost that sense of mystery. I don't think I ever sat down and _intended_ to write a song. I don't even know that I could. I just closed my eyes and listened, and there they were, humming out there in the dark, waiting for my fingertips to pull them down to the fretboard.

So on those endless journeys by bus, we took those fragments and turned them into songs, playing them over and over until they sounded like what I was hearing in my head. Then we worked on our song sketches at soundcheck, bringing in Dieter and Dick bit by bit, slowly sewing the whole thing together. It was amazing how they changed, mutated, grew, because I'd have one idea in my head for how the drums would go, but then I'd play the song for Dick, and his ears would prick up and he'd just go "Oh, wow, yeah, I can hear it..." and start bashing away at something totally different and yet even _better_ than what I'd had in my head. The songs came alive when Dick got his hands on them; that's when they stopped being just sketches and started being real, living, breathing Metropolis tracks. And getting Dick involved while the songs were still open, unformed, embryonic things, oh man, how much that just opened up the rhythmic diversity of our material to a whole new world.

The new material was different; sharper, leaner than the woozy atmosphere of the songs on _Lights! Camera! Action!_ , honed by a year of playing together nearly every single night. But what it lacked in the meandering prettiness of the earlier tracks, it made up for in the new intricacy of the rhythms. OK, they weren't quite yet at Deltawave levels of subtle jazziness, but even Dieter was dragged off his insistence on playing the kind of simple, anthemic 4/4 basslines that made posing with his instrument easier, as he slowly learned to weave between me and Dick's jittering kick drum. 

And slowly, once we'd played those new songs at a dozen soundchecks, that's when we'd start to experiment, just to liven up the boredom of the set-list, slowly trying to work the new material into the sets alongside the old. _Nowhere Fast_ was the first of the new songs to make it into the set, the first song to really be written completely live, an ode to our gorgeous silver tourbus. We fucked about with the rhythms on that one, Dick pulling out this weird off-kilter ska beat on the verses that I would never have dreamed of, but just totally _worked_ , catching the off-beats of my guitar work, light-years ahead of any of our old songs.

I could play our old songs in my sleep by this point, running on pure muscle memory, my hands moving to the right shapes without my even having to think about what note came next. And that left my head free to dance about the stars, floating somewhere in that perfect flow state where I didn't know where I was or what I was doing. The magic worked some nights, but other nights, playing a gig just felt like a job, and even throwing myself physically into my little dance routines couldn't make it take off. It was so weird to think back to our very first tour, before we were even signed. Because as drunk as we'd been, that was the last time the gigs still felt like individual events. Sure, my memories were blurring a bit, but I could remember distinctly that it was Baltimore where we'd played on a low stage in that odd little venue with the cafe in the back, and Atlanta was the stinky venue with the backed up toilet, and Knoxville was the sweaty basement where we didn't even rate a stage, and I stared into the mass of pogoing kids at chest-level, terrified they were going to kick my guitar pedals over.

But over the past year, the gigs had all started to flow into one another, like I could no longer tell our Atlanta gig from our Kansas City gig from our Vancouver gig. In retrospect, shows were blurring together into blocks vaguely labelled "Britain" or "six weeks with Mexican Summers" or "Tertiary Markets" in my memory. It was one thing when I couldn't remember whether our first gig with Darin had been at the Spiral or the Pyramid Club. But quite another when I couldn't remember if we'd hired Ronnie during our third tour of the States or our fourth. No, wait, Ronnie had come on board with the bus. It was Simon that we'd hired during that third tour. Or was it our fourth? Was Simon before or after KROQ? And don't even ask me to distinguish German festivals from Swedish festivals, they were smearing in my memory into one long summer festival where the beer never stopped flowing and I was getting calluses on the back of my ears from the in-ear monitors.

We had grown so much as a band, and we had, over the course of the past year, turned from East Village chancers to professional musicians, without even noticing when it had happened. But what we had gained in slick professionality, we had lost in spontaneity. We tried varying our sets up a bit, throwing in surprises, B-sides, the occasional odd cover, and it seemed like the kids appreciated that. But what we needed was new material, and it was up to me and Doyle to work on that, during those long hours on the bus. My ambition was to have the second album completely written and well rehearsed by the end of the tour, so that we could go straight into the studio on our return, and by six weeks into our tour, we were halfway to my goal.

But we were all sick of touring. At the beginning of an album cycle, it was still exciting and fun, watching what new audiences made of our material. But although the venues were getting progressively bigger on each jaunt, it took us further and further away from the crowd. Instead of seeing faces pressed up almost against my knees on tiny stages in clubs, the kids were 20, 30 feet away, pressed up on the other side of a barricade behind bouncers, and it was almost impossible to judge the reaction beyond the first few rows.

But people kept coming. They must, because someone was snapping up those tickets, and someone was buying the T-shirts and merchandise, requiring Musketeer to reprint T-shirts and restock our albums again and again. Metropolis had somehow gone from a tiny cottage industry to full-time operation that managed to employ four extra people on tour. The responsibility - the pressure - it was kind of overwhelming, even as the attention from fans was ego-warping.

But emails from Merry, I found, kept me sane, kept me grounded, kept me connected to some idea of who I was at home. I had agreed to email her once a week, but found myself firing off emails once or twice a day, or a whole volley if she was online at the same time as me, just catching up on those little day to day minutiae of our lives. I loved that little ping in my hotmail inbox, knowing she was coming back with some enthusiastic response to my news, or sharing some tiny but important moment of her own day. Compared to the endless boredom of the tourbus, I _lived_ for those moments. My heart leapt, with the urgency of a teenage crush, every time I logged onto my email and saw her screen name - Rilly Rilly Fine Filly - in my inbox. She still had the spare set of keys to my loft, and stayed there when she was in NYC, which reassured me in some way that we were still connected, were still a couple, a cohabiting couple.

But things were not great in the Deltawave camp. With much difficulty and compromise, they had finally finished the album and delivered it to Windlass, but Bebe was not happy. All that arguing and compromise and tense lunches in the farmhouse had resulted in an album full of duets and dialogues. Windlass didn't want duets; they wanted tracks with Merry on lead that they could promote as singles. So against everyone's wishes, Deltawave went back to the studio to record 2 new tracks with Merry on lead, and recut one of the existing tracks to replace Elisha's vocal with Merry's. None of them liked it, but when Merry sent me an MP3 of the rough mix of one of the two new tracks, I was almost shocked by the depth in it. Listening to it sent strange shivers down the back of my spine. Even based on the rough mix, Bebe had earmarked it for the first single. Yet it didn't sound like one of Elisha's tracks at all; even though the arrangement had that distinctive loopy, baroque Deltawave sensibility, the melody had a sweet simplicity and poppy directness to it that Elisha's tense, noodling compositions completely lacked.

'This is one of yours, isn't it?' I emailed her immediately. 'Why don't you write more for your band - this is amazing!'

'I've got binders full of songs,' she wrote back, and I could almost read the laughter in the plain courier typeface of my Netscape inbox. 'No one wants to hear my songs.'

'*I* want to hear your songs.'

In the morning, when I checked my email, there was an MP3 in my inbox. I popped it on my headphones and lined it up, prepared to listen with ears that were fair, and to issue honest yet un-harsh criticism, while remembering the whole time that Merry was my girlfriend and needed my support. And then the ground dropped away beneath me as a cello took flight, twisted into a haunting melody, then twined together with Merry's voice as Gabe's unmistakable drums brushed to life below, and I realised it wasn't a cello at all, but Merry's eBowed bass. "Feels like we're dreaming when we're wide awake," purred Merry's cool, low, slightly throaty voice. "This time I'm gonna love you like hearts don't break."

I played the track again, feeling really quite light-headed. "The most unpolished demos are always the best," Bebe had once told me. "Because then you can tell whether it's actually the song you're responding to, or just the production." And even in raw, embryonic form, every instinct I had told me that the song was special. I downloaded it to my laptop to listen again, then hit reply and stared at the empty email. Although I'd been prepared to sugar-coat my reaction, and be nice and supportive for the sake of my girlfriend's ego, I suddenly found myself with a dilemma. If I obeyed my instinct, and wrote back with the full bore of my excitement, telling her it was amazing and urging her to send it over to Bebe immediately, because, really, this should be the next Deltawave single unless they were all absolutely fucking stupid, she'd think I was currying favour or buttering her up because just I had to, out of loyalty, or maybe even taking the piss.

And yet, it felt somehow dishonest, not to freak out and type with wild abandon, the way I would have ordinarily shot off an excited email to her, declaring 'OMG THE NEW SLUR SINGLE HAVE U HEARD IT IS THE FUCKING BEST HOT DAMN SO SO SUPER GOOD I CAN'T EVEN TYPE ASLFJKLJ KLASDJ FKLASJD ALJFLKSDFJALKSDJFK!!!!!!!!!!!11' Yet the excitement I felt, listening to her song again, for the third or fourth time in a row, it was the same prickle of certainty as when I listened to a Mexican Summers record, and just knew, which one was the single. And not for the first time, I felt myself actually caught, between friend and fan, between boyfriend and music fanatic, seeing Merry flickering between the partner I sometimes bickered with, and an amazing artist whose talent I was completely awed by.

In the end, I erred on the side of caution, saying that I was super proud of her, and that I loved the track, and please could I have some more because, really, hot damn, I had been expecting to have to sugar-coat my reactions, when there was no need. I absolutely loved them. And the next morning, there were 4 more MP3s in my inbox.

So I listened to MP3s of her demos late at night, in my bunk, feeling the old tug between being her boyfriend and being her A&R guy. Because the boyfriend in me told me that I should encourage her to stay with her band and work their contract because I knew she needed the support of being part of that team. But the A&R guy in me knew that these songs, if arranged and recorded properly, with the care given to Elisha's songs, were a hundred times _more commercial_ than anything Deltawave were doing, even knowing that Deltawave had already had a number one single and a platinum album. Merry had been learning from the best. These songs were not Deltawave level catchy; these songs were Jezebel level catchy. If I was her A &R and not her boyfriend, I would be pushing her to finish these, and yet...

And yet, and yet. I was stuck on tour in the midwest somewhere, and Merry was back in Upstate New York.

The Elisha situation deteriorated. Compromise followed compromise, move followed counter-move. Elisha wanted to call the album _Weightless Semiotics_ , which I thought was a terrible name. It sounded like something Dieter would come up with after about the third line of coke, something that might work for some weird little arthouse band, but not for the kind of band that had supported Jezebel and were aiming for another number one. Merry hated it, but she was tired of arguing, and Gabe didn't care. Bebe warned them against it, said it would never play in Peoria, that they should choose something simpler and catchier. But Elisha was still simmering over the issue of the duets, and chose that hill to die on. The name stayed, like a leaden albatross, as if Elisha were deliberately trying to sabotage his own band.

So by the time _Weightless Semiotics_ finally came out, the whole thing just felt like a compromise. I flew home from tour on a midnight flight after a gig, even knowing I'd have to get up and take the red-eye back just over 24 hours later, just because I wanted to be there for my partner. (And every time we did that, one of us flying across country overnight to see the other, I silently thanked my former idol turned love rival, Peter Book, for putting the idea of this possibility in our heads.) With my support, Merry put a brave face on it, and smiled and faked it for the record release party. But then again, even the party felt wrong. Instead of holding it downtown, in their heartland of the Lower East Side, Elisha had insisted they book some fancy schmancy lounge in the West 50s. Almost no one from the downtown scene even made it up - no Charms, no Stakes, no ex-Rocket Pops - but it was full of weird industry people, and not just the old guard of Windlass, but people who introduced themselves as being in 'films' or 'television'.

Merry and I arrived together, early, before the main doors opened, and obviously we left together as we _lived_ together, but for the whole of the party, we had to go through this weird charade of pretending we were not even dating. Every time Merry and I drifted together in the crowd - and god forbid I should even surreptitiously squeeze her hand for good luck, or tickle the small of her back to make her smile - Michael swooped down and dragged her off to talk to 'someone important'. (From 'films' or 'television', no doubt.) I did my best not to take it personally, taking the opportunity to catch up with Bebe over at the bar, but it did still irk, especially considering I was risking yet another lecture from Dieter over this, on how I was always choosing Deltawave over my own band.

I did not like Michael the manager. I mean, I had taken a strong dislike him before, even over the phone, but in person he really super-rubbed me the wrong way, one of those supercilious, unctuous guys that always seemed to be scoping you out for what you could do for him. Though I pretended to get along with him for Merry's sake, as soon as I was able, I retreated to a corner with Cindy to trade catty barbs about his total lack of fashion sense, because honestly, _that_ blazer, with those jeans - and I saw what she meant about Big and Tall Men's Outlet super-relaxed fit - what the hell was he thinking? No style at all. In any sense of the word.

When the place cleared out and we mercifully got to leave, the divisions showed even more plainly. Unlike the Metropolis release party, where we'd all bundled off to an after-hours joint together, still hyped up on our excitement, Deltawave separated out. Elisha and Michael and Bebe headed uptown, for a late dinner booked at a fancy restaurant, while Merry, Gabe and I - with Barry and Cindy in tow - headed off in two cabs downtown, for a nightcap at the Lacuna Lounge. Even as we sat in the traditional front booth, with Barry trying to persuade me to try some arcane Gaelic whiskey, the difference from the last record release party, with all of us dancing to Bananarama around the juke box, was palpable. Merry and Gabe toasted one another, trading quips about what chart placement they might get, but their smiles were forced, and no one around the table even dared mention Elisha's name.

 

\----------

 

To be honest, when I took the red-eye back to my own tour, Metropolis weren't in much better shape. That last tour went on too long. We were all bored, and sick of it, and boredom led to idle hands, and idle hands lead to the devil's work, and if there was the devil's work to be done, PCPete had the nose to sniff it out. Over the weeks of the tour, my initial distrust and suspicion of PCPete had crystallised into a nagging and pervasive dislike of the guy. Sure, he continued to be unsettlingly nice to me, ingratiating even, but somehow his fawning politeness only irked me more. I did not like him, and I did not like the people that my bandmates seemed to turn into, when they were around him. He was just one of those guys who, though superficially nice and smiley on the surface, just seemed to sew discord wherever he went.

Things went wrong in Seattle, literally the one night I was away at Merry's release party. On our day off, PCPete took Dieter and Dick out in search of a legendary grunge nightspot, and failed to come back. It was a long drive up to the next gig, in Vancouver, and Tony started to worry when they were not back by noon. He was in a bit of a state when I arrived in a taxi from Sea-Tac airport, constantly checking his cellphone to see if there had been any word from them. Dieter, sure - well, we were used to all sorts of shit from Dieter, disappearing with random girls and ringing from suburbs twenty miles out of town, expecting to be picked up from his trysting place. But Dick? Dick had always been the sensible, almost-married one. (Not to mention that back when we'd been driving ourselves from gig to gig, Dick took great pride in staying sober and driving.) Without Dick's girlfriend to keep him on the straight and narrow, and without the responsibility of being the driver, he was starting to lose the plot.

At 2pm, when Tony was almost frantic, Dieter finally rang - from the emergency room. The whole tourbus made a detour to the hospital, to pick up a doped-up Dick, full of painkillers with his left hand in a bandage, plus a skittish, chattering Dieter and a surly PCPete. It took us hours to get the story out of them. Something had gone bad as they were trying to negotiate a drug deal out behind the nightclub - Dieter wanted coke, but they had somehow ended up with Crystal Meth. Dick tried some, just to make sure, and it turned out Dick and Crystal Meth were like gasoline and a match, and they had ended up in a fight with the dealer. Dick had boxed at school, he knew how to handle himself in a fight, wrestling off both the dealer and his accomplice, who had pulled a knife - a knife! Christ, Dick was lucky it hadn't been a gun! - but Dieter and PCPete had cut and run. It had taken them all night wandering around Seattle in a daze to find the hospital where Dick had gone to get his sliced-up hand bandaged.

It was only his left hand, Dick insisted. He could still play drums, just a bit lighter. But he started drinking to manage the pain, and that made him sloppy. I started freaking out, thinking of what we had been through with Darin. But then the next night, PCPete had a word with Dick before the show, and the show was fine; in fact it was brilliant, resounding with more than our usual manic energy. Dick pounded the skins as if he didn't even have a hand injury, and Dieter was almost doing backflips off the keyboard riser, he was twirling around so fast. It looked - and sounded - absolutely amazing, the band completely on fire.

But it wasn't until two weeks later, when Dick went off the rails and smashed up a dressing room in Arizona, that I discovered the source of my band's new energy. Tony was shouting for help, crying that Dick was on a rampage, he'd already flattened Dieter, for 'looking at him the wrong way'. We came running; it took both Doyle and me to pull him off pounding Dieter's bloodied face, as Tony grabbed Dieter and pulled him out of danger.

"Let me at him, I'll fucking kill him!" Dick howled, even as I tackled him by the legs and Doyle wrestled his arms behind his back. Dick was strong, those arms were like tree trunks bent on destroying our bassist.

"Sorry, Dick, there's already a queue to kill Dieter, and you just have to wait your turn," Doyle told him rather calmly as we wrestled him to the floor. Our drummer was normally the kind of man so mild-mannered as to apologise profusely even for bumping into you, so I had no idea where this rage was coming from.

"it's not my fault he's fucked so many Polish girls his Dick-brain's turned into a Kielbasa," Dieter snapped, while dabbing a napkin at his blood-seeping nose.

At that, Dick slipped out from under Doyle's wrestling hold, and went for Dieter again, roaring "I'm gonna rip off your head and piss down your neck, you shit-stained little nazi winklepicker!"

This time it took both Tony and Doyle to each grab hold of an arm, and me to pull his legs out from underneath him, and lay him back on the floor like a heifer. Dieter danced back out of reach, looking distinctly alarmed. "What the fuck has got into him?" Doyle wondered, his eyes wide, with admiration of Dick's sheer phyiscal strength as much as his own adrenaline.

The three of us had to sit on him until he calmed down, and then the story came out. PCPete had taught Dick an old trick he learned playing with all those crazy Industrial bands that used to smash up machinery in the 80s. Drinking killed the pain, but made you sloppy. Adding amphetamines into the mix brought back the focus, and doubled one's energy. So PCPete had been pouring a mixture of Jack Daniels and cheap trucker speed into Dick, and the "Lemmy Special" turned our normally milquetoast drummer into a rampaging bull elephant.

Dick, the next day, was apologetic and even slightly confused, wondering why his legs were covered in bruises, as if he barely remembered trying to take our bassist's head off with a fire extinguisher. "Dee, man, I am so sorry," he told Dieter, when informed of the origin of the laceration across the top of his nose, and actually appeared to mean it, as if astonished by the violence of which he hadn't realised he was capable. So complete was the transformation in Dick, back to the mild-mannered drummer we knew, that Dieter agreed to shake hands and forget the whole thing.

Tony rang our booking agent and rescheduled a few dates on the tour - which meant we would only have a week and a half of rest in New York before heading over to Europe - and sent Dick to another emergency room to have his stitches re-sewn where he'd managed to pull them loose. This time, the stitches took, so he cut back on the Jack Daniels, and tried to stay on the straight and narrow.

But wherever PCPete went, drugs were sure to follow. The guy was bad news, through and through. It was completely unpredictable what would set Dick off. Some fan would buy him a shot of Jack Daniel's after a gig, as he was known through the fandom for having a predilection for it, then he'd catch sight of PCPete chopping out meth, and the drink would override whatever circuit of sense told him he shouldn't do this, and he would succumb. One night he would be fine, pounding the drums like a maniac to work through his speed-fuelled high, and the next night, some trip-switch would flip in his head and he would freak the fuck out. And Dieter did not help, as he took a peculiar joy in goading Dick, knowing that Doyle and I would always intervene.

We had a word with both of them. "Listen, Dee you petulant man-child. Don't think I don't see what you're doing. Lay off the comments about his ex," Doyle warned Dieter. "Or the next time, we won't intervene and none of us will pull Dick off you until you are missing the rest of your teeth and your face looks like ten pounds of minced hamburger. Do I make myself clear?"

I was left to have a word with Dick. "Dick, you know..." I ventured. "In this band, if we have a problem with someone, we talk. We do not throw fire extinguishers and beat people to a bloody pulp. We _talk_."

Dick nodded sagely. "Yeah, I get that, Boss. It's just... I guess when I drink, I lose my head at little bit."

"Look, you know everything that we went through with Darin over the drinking."

"Please, don't sack me, Boss," Dick mumbled apologetically, his soft blue eyes so downcast that I found it hard to believe this was the same man Doyle had had to get in a headlock the previous evening to stop him from smashing Dieter's skull. "I can work this out. I don't know what came over me."

"Just don't take that first shot of JD," I tried to reason with him. Why was this so hard for the man to understand? "Or if you do, just show some sense and stay away from PCPete and his trucker speed."

"I do try, Boss." Dick hung his head, examining the stitches of his healing wound, peeling the skin back compulsively, though he'd been told to leave it alone.

"Well, try harder. I know Dieter is irritating, but..."

"I don't even find Dee irritating. He's fine in my book, we're good friends. I think of him like a brother," Dick shrugged, as if it were perfectly normal to attempt beat someone you found 'fine' to a bloody pulp on a weekly basis. That was the infuriating thing about Dick; that after these explosions he seemed to act as if he had no idea what had happened, or why he'd done what he did. "I have no problem with Dee. He's just a kid who sometimes says dumb stuff. I don't even know what happens when I drink."

And Dick did his best not to succumb, but he seemed to find the high irresistible. He'd be fine for a week, then he'd snap and chew up a line, or much worse, smoke a rock, until eventually he and PCPete took to grinding and snorting Adderall if they couldn't get any form of amphetamine. Adderall actually had the effect of calming Dick and making him somewhat more easy-going... until someone handed him a tumbler of Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels made Dick stupid, and _stupid_ made Dick punch people. Any by 'people' I mean, well, Dieter.

How we finished the tour was a mystery to me, but I holed myself up in the front lounge with Doyle, finishing writing the album, and trying to ignore the chaos in the rhythm section. Once we were back in New York, something would have to be done. There was no way that we were getting rid of Dick, after all the trouble we'd had finding him. It was PCPete that had to go.


	28. It's Very Fancy On Old Delancey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Metropolis come home from a chaotic tour, to find chaos back at home, as both Dieter and Doyle have lost the thing they cared most about.
> 
> Can Daniel sort out his band's living situation, find a new keyboard-player, and keep them from each others' throats long enough to start working on their second album?

I was getting too used to touring. It had even started to seem normal, and five months of living gig to gig, traversing the North American continent in that silver bus, had passed in the blink of an eye, before a much-battered Metropolis crawled home to NYC for a few weeks off, before the European Festival Season started.

But before we could even address the PCPete issue, there was the problem of the chaos that we discovered on our return to New York. Dick was alright; he flew home to Dallas to dry out, and seemed much better and healthier once he was off tour and away from the corrupting influence in the backline. And I was alright; in fact, I was delighted to find Merry currently ensconced at my loft between legs of her own tours, and collapsed happily into her arms. I liked coming home to Merry; I _liked_ coming home to scented candles in the bathroom and fresh fruit in the fridge. We had agreed to put off babymaking until our current album cycles were complete, so a huge box of those fancy condoms had been procured. But before I even had a chance to gird up and enter my beautiful girlfriend's sweet fanny, my phone started to ring. It was Dieter, in a complete tis-was, insisting that I come round Fancy Delancey immediately. Moaning and cursing my bandmates, I pulled my trousers back on, and Merry and I walked up the long blocks, holding hands in the New York sunshine.

Fancy Delancey was no longer fancy; the apartment had been completely trashed. Everything of value was gone: musical instruments, clothes, Dieter's huge collection of rare 80s vinyl. What little furniture could not be lifted and moved had been completely wrecked, smashed as if with an axe, even partially burned, and there was graffiti all over the walls. The toilet was blocked with condoms and a couple of used syringes floated on top of the mess. Auntie Beast, left to her own devices, had clearly turned the place into a shooting gallery. I called the police, but it wasn't much good. The name "Auntie Beast" and the description of a white woman approximately 30 years of age, 5'6", slim build, with black-dyed hair, did not get very far. I mean, that was every punk rock girl on the Lower East Side.

They changed the locks, and Dieter and Doyle moved into my loft while the apartment was gutted and renovated - at the co-op's expense - which Merry took with cheerful solidarity, but I could tell she was not pleased with the arrangement. Dieter, at least, tended not to sleep at the loft, but he hung around during the day, leering at Merry with a lasciviousness that made her deeply uncomfortable.

Merry, thankfully, agreed with me on the PCPete issue; she couldn't stand the guy, either. After a couple of days of him hanging around the loft with Dieter, she told him in no uncertain terms to get lost. He was not welcome in the flat, and neither was Dieter if the pair of them insisted on hanging out.

"I'm glad you said something," I told her as I lay back in bed, during the resultant first proper evening alone we'd had since I'd got back to New York. "He makes my skin crawl."

Merry curled up against me, her post-coital glow fading slightly as she shivered at the mention of him. "PCPete? Ugh, I cannot believe he is still playing that same old tired 'Splatterblade Records' line he has been using since the 80s."

I laughed, playing with her hair. "Is there even a Splatterblade Records?"

"I think there was once," explained Merry. "I think Edwin who works over at Kim's Video founded it, like, a decade ago, to put out rare singles by the Jesus Sugarpussy, and Pete bought it off him when Edwin got bored with it. But Pete doesn't run it as a label; he just uses it as an _in_ with people. I have lost track of how many bands he has conned into hanging out with him or whatever, because he _says_ he owns a record label."

Somehow, it just didn't surprise me, like nothing shocked me any more in the music scene. "It's the same thing as the drugs, isn't it? It's like he's trying to... ingratiate himself with people. I never trust people who always try to give you drugs for free. If you don't pay in cash, you end up paying in some other way."

Merry nodded slowly, though she was now engrossed with my ribcage, tapping her fingers against my ribs as if trying to work something out.

"Are you still trying to write basslines on my body?"

"Sorry." She giggled, and kissed my nipple before wrapping her arm around my waist. "He is just... you know what he is? He's a male groupie, is what he is."

"Sweetie," I warned. "That's not a very nice word." I had, recently, been given a bollocking by Sandra for even jokingly referring to her and the Becks as 'groupies', followed by a lecture on the subtle gradations between fangirls, band aids, tour girlfriends, and _groupies_ , who were the lowest of the low on the fan totem pole, as far as the girls were concerned. I'd had no idea. On the road, it had been very, very easy to fall into the lazy assumption that all the women hanging around the band basically wanted to sleep with us. The difference between fangirls and groupies, to my innocent mind, seemed to boil down to love, rather than sex. Fangirls actually loved us - the band or more importantly our music - regardless of whether they wanted to sleep with us or not. Groupies, on the contrary, were just in it for the sex, and that sex, unlike the band aids and the tour girlfriends, wasn't even about desire, either for the band in the former case or the individual in the latter, it was just about collecting dudes in bands - any dudes, in any bands. Now I could understand loving music so much you wanted to have a sexual relationship with its creator; that was how I'd felt about Jeanette, after all. But groupies? That just seemed gross.

"No, for real. That is what he is. A male groupie. A hanger-on. Actually, worse than a groupie. A parasite. Like, even groupies have their place in the ecosystem of rock bands. I have some kind of respect for groupies - they just put it right out there, what they're there for. And you know, they have their role, they do their bit. They suck your drummer's cock so he doesn't die of frustration. They bolster and fluff up your singer's ego so he doesn't drive the rest of the band insane with his demands while on tour!"

"Merry!" I gasped. I don't know why, but I had always through of Gabe as so, I dunno... innocent. I could not imagine him getting a blow-job off a groupie. But then again, I could never have imagined myself getting a blow-job off a fangirl, and that had happened. Mentally, I readjusted my internal image of Gabe.

"It's true, though," she protested. "What do guys like Pete ever bring to bands? Apart from drugs, chaos and personality disorders?"

"Stop being right," I mumbled into the crook of her shoulder. "I'll sack him before the next tour. It has to be done."

After a couple of days searching, Dieter's record collection - or at least the bulk of it, minus a few particularly valuable rarities and collectibles - turned up at Bleecker Bob's. Bleecker Bob - or Slob, as he was known in the music scene - noticed the 'Dieter F' sticker emblazoned across many of the dust sleeves, then found a rough mix of the Metropolis album with Gerry's number scrawled on it, stuffed in amidst the vinyl. He rang Gerry, and Gerry, knowing that almost the whole band were staying at my apartment now, rang me. Dieter went down, and tried to drag a police officer along with him, but they weren't interested in petty theft. Fuming, Dieter found himself extorted into paying Bleecker Slob the several hundred dollars (he wouldn't reveal exactly how much) that Slob had paid the junkie, to get his own vinyl back. I had never known Dieter to get sentimental or even soppy over another human being in his life, but the attention he lavished on those ancient Wax Trax and Mute and 4AD 12 inches as he hauled them up the freight elevator to my loft for safekeeping, well, it surprised me. I'd never seen Dieter show that kind of care with a human being.

Doyle, however, well, it was Doyle's turn to go off the rails a bit. He wasn't even that upset about the flat, as he hadn't had that many possessions left to lose. After all, when he'd split from Effie halfway through the first tour, over rumours he was banging a Spanish telenovela actress named Brenda (they weren't even rumours; he totally was) it got back to us that she'd burned all the clothes and gifts she'd given him. Doyle had appeared totally unfazed by that, said they were only possessions, and he wasn't hung up on material goods. But, apparently it was the disappearance of _this_ girlfriend, the hideous Aunt Beast, that had bothered him. I did not understand why, but Doyle was obsessed with the woman. Perhaps after being spoiled by such profligate beauty and easy lays, surrounded by stunningly attractive models and easily available groupies for the past year, Doyle was obsessed with ugliness and abandonment. 

He vanished from our flat, and went on a week-long binge, disappearing into parts of Brooklyn none of us dared follow, and when he finally resurfaced, he said that Auntie Beast was just gone. For junkies and dealers to disappear was not uncommon. Some said that she had overdosed and vanished; others said she had quit the lifestyle and moved to California to get clean. But Doyle was flattened by the loss, neglecting his beautiful body and letting his handsome face get puffy and swollen with drink and worse. This time he could no longer get away with claiming it was just the flu; it was obvious that Doyle's constant 'illness' was the start of a habit. Unlike Dick, Doyle was fine when he was on the road. It was when he got home to New York that he strayed back into boredom and ugly habits.

But we had a stroke of good luck disguised as bad, while Tony was just finishing up sorting out the visas for the "summer of European festivals" leg of the tour. PCPete had a string of convictions in London and Berlin for drug busts dating back to the 80s. With an arrest record like that, PCPete was not welcome back in the UK or Germany, the two countries where we'd booked the most festivals. So without my even needing to come up with an excuse, our keyboardist was summarily told that his services would no longer be necessary. And I crossed my fingers and hoped to god that once Dick and PCPete were parted, that the amphetamine would depart, too. I mean, it had been bad enough that one of Metropolis had been banging a drug dealer, did we have to actually invite one into the band as well? Oh, but now there was the problem of finding a touring keyboard player for the European tour, as our new material would not work without one.

We found a keyboard player, though, in the nick of time, before we'd even started properly looking. Duncan Cortes (who, with his little brother Branwell, had once done some session work with Merry and Gabe a few years previous) had heard word from Charlene that we needed a synth player, stat. He had been working part time as a bar back at the Lacuna Lounge, and just slipped it into a conversation that he was available, while he cleared a booth for Merry and I. Best of all, he didn't even need to give notice to take off for Europe in a week. 

We did a few rehearsals with the gangling organist with the shoulder-length hair, checked him for drug convictions and unsavoury habits, and ended up impressed; both by his ability to instantly recall tunes he had heard only once, and his ability to antagonise Dieter simply by slouching into the room in a Pink Floyd T-shirt and jeans. Completely irrationally, I managed to convince Doyle and Dick that it was just bad luck to have anyone in Metropolis whose name didn't start with D, and they, believe it or not, swallowed it. Although Dieter sputtered with outrage at the superstition, the three of us ignored him and voted Duncan in. Our new keyboard player was hired, given a sleek, new, Metropolis-friendly haircut under my direction, issued with a suit, and off we went to Europe to play some festivals. And in Europe, I hoped, we could keep Dick away from speed and Doyle away from smack.

Duncan, it turned out, was a stabilising influence on Dick. He was also Texan, over which the two of them instantly bonded, slapping one another on the back and addressing one another in what sounded like fake Tex-Mex Spanish, all _hombre_ and _mi amigo_. Duncan didn't seem that interested in drugs, I never saw him indulge in anything stronger than the occasional spliff, and maybe magic mushrooms, once, at a festival in Holland. What Duncan was into, was food, like, hot damn, you would not believe a guy that lanky could put away as much pulled pork as he could. But instead of going off in search of drugs, Duncan would drag Dick - or Tony, or Doyle or whoever was around - off in search of some obscure local delicacy. Spanish choritzo, impossibly spicy Portuguese peppers, stinky French cheese, bizarre Italian sea creatures with tentacles, you name it, if Duncan could get it on a plate, he would have my bandmates eating it. For nearly a month it worked, I mean, OK, Dick and Doyle were both getting a bit chubby from all the gormandising without the drug-fuelled energy to work it off, but at least they were staying clean, right?

Well, it worked until we hit Germany. Playing some big festival filled with metalheads and the trucker speed that seemed to accompany them, Dick ran into some old friends of his from back home. Somehow half my band ended up on some misadventure involving driving to Hamburg overnight, catching some serious debauchery in the all-night entertainment of the Reeperbahn, then racing back on the autobahn in the small hours of the morning. Somehow they made it by the skin of their teeth, breaking the ton the whole way home, but in Hamburg, Dick had fallen off the wagon again in a big way.

I mean, was this my fault? Should I have kept a closer eye and a tighter rein on my bandmates? I did feel guilty, but I also felt like this was kinda not supposed to be my responsibility any more; I hadn't even known about the Hamburg jaunt beforehand, let alone been invited. But then again, I hadn't known, because I had been holed up in my hotel room, chatting with Merry on IRC. They had their addictions, but I had mine. Though seriously, wasn't it supposed to be Tony's job these days to keep my band on this side of chaos, not mine?

Tony, however, had an almost full-time job just keeping Dieter in line. For a start, Dieter's cock ring set off airport security all over Europe. That was the most embarrassing aspect of touring now. We would have to make him go last, and slope through the metal detectors one by one, then huddle in a gang as Dieter set off the alarm, the inevitable sniggers as the hand-held metal detectors blared against his crotch. And then, to top it off, Dieter's expression of gleeful malevolence as he'd pull out his cock and show his Prince Albert to some unsuspecting security guard - preferably female - as if he secretly derived some exhibitionist thrill from the performance.

"For fucks sake," I hissed after about the fifth repetition of this ritual, somewhere in Spain. "Can't you just take it out before you fly?"

"No," insisted Dieter defiantly. "If I take it out, it has to be sterilised again before it's replaced. And the pressure at high altitudes could make the holes close over, and I could end up with an abscess. So some security ladies see my cock; big deal. If you can't handle the fact that some people have personal piercings, you have no business working in an airport."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "You fucker, you enjoy this, don't you."

"Wouldn't you?" asked Dieter, raising his eyebrows wickedly, but then he looked me up and down and shrugged dismissively. "Then again, no, I suppose you wouldn't."

I had the vague sense that I had just been insulted, but couldn't quite work out how, until Doyle came up behind us. "Actually, Merry personally told me, that Daniel, for a little guy, has the most massive cock she has ever laid eyes - or anything else - on. Like a tree trunk, she said. You know what they say about short guys with Napoleon complexes." He moved on with a wink, leaving both Dieter and myself fuming, as I wondered if I should feel complimented, or insulted, or... hey, hang on, what the fuck was my girlfriend doing telling Doyle about my cock size anyway?

It was hard to believe, there had once been a time when I was dying to quit my office job at Windlass and go off on the road forever. At this point, all I craved was the familiarity and stability of home.

 

\----------

 

When "a summer of festivals in Europe" threatened to turn into "followed by Autumn - or rather, their Spring - in Australia" I finally put my foot down. Enough touring. We wanted to go home. We _needed_ to go home. We could not wring another ounce of sentiment out of any of the songs on the first album. Surely there were no more sales to be had (except maybe in Australia, but really, the antipodes could wait). But also, with the songs now completely written and finished, I wanted to get the band home and into the studio to start the second album before we all collapsed.

Of course there were complaints about the studio scheduling, the inevitable whining from the rhythm section. Dieter wanted to pick up his position as king of the Lower East Side Party Scene again, though Dick, somewhat more sensibly, wanted to crawl off back to Dallas and try to flush the Amphetamine bug he'd picked up yet again in Hamburg right out of his system. Doyle, however, had got clean and got healthy again in Europe, away from the temptations of Brooklyn, and agreed with me that going into a remote studio would keep him out of trouble. So the pair of us insisted, and we booked rehearsal studio time in New York before heading out to Cranberry Studios, the same place in Connecticut we'd recorded our debut, for the whole of August.

What a difference a year and a half of touring made to the band's tightness, our rhythmic complexity stunning me, as we were able to stop and start on a dime. Dick's metronomic drumming had given way to a complex, interlocking, machine-like precision. And all the production tricks I had learned from Barry and Ken, the finer mysteries of compression, I could not wait to put them into action. I would end up teaching Terry a thing or two about engineering, instead of the other way around. How things would be reversed!

With the bigger budget for the second record, I had bought more guitars, and I couldn't wait to try them out. I'd finally bought a proper, vintage Gibson 330, though its finish was cherry red, rather than the sunburst I'd really wanted, and splurged on a 12-string Rickenbacker that I only really used for one song, but had to have, because jangling away on it made me feel like Steve from Dead Letters. I kept the Rat pedal, but added a special Death By Audio custom-made distortion pedal, tweaked to the particular sweet spot in the audio spectrum that would cut through Dick's cymbals. And while on our last tour of Britain, I had gone on a little spending spree on Denmark Street, and selected a variety of custom boutique delay and chorus pedals to try out while recording. _Now_ , I was ready to go into the studio again.

You know, it's true what they say about second albums. You have your whole damn life to prepare for the first album, and then a few snatched weeks to prepare for the second. We had the songs written already, on that endless tour. Sure, I was certain they were good, convinced that they had levelled up on the first album on the same scale that the first Metropolis album had levelled up on those shitty Kiss You In Paris demos. And I went into the recording process with an even clearer vision of what I wanted to achieve with the second album, and drove my band even harder to achieve it. But, you know, maybe too hard, sometimes. Still, I wanted to capture the ferocity of what we had started to sound like on the road, capture that swagger, that bluster of a band whose accomplishments had finally started to catch up to our ambitions. And there, in that sweatbox of a rehearsal studio in Brooklyn, the new Metropolis started to take shape.

From the moment I booked the studio time, I had intended to produce, in fact, I had already informed Terry that we were hiring him only for his capabilities as an engineer. But as we sat together, in the rehearsal space's manky common area, to draw up a battle plan for the recording sessions, Dieter swung into pole position.

At first, I sat down at the head of the table with my coffee, and brought out one of my binders, with the list of songs I had decided we should work on, and the order we would attack them. But almost immediately, Dieter reached over with his impossibly long arms, snatched the paper out of my hand and started scribbling over it with his red sharpie.

"Nope, we're not doing that song, no way. And that one, save it for the end, maybe we can relegate it to a B-side. But we are definitely working on _Ugly_ , and on _Nowhere Fast_ , and on that other track, that beastie ditty you two play on the bus all the time. We are not leaving the recording studio until we have got that track on tape," insisted Dieter.

"Beastie?" I said, and turned to Doyle, perplexed. "You getting into hip-hop, dude?"

"You know the one. That _you have made a beast of yourself_ song." As Dieter croaked a tuneless attempt at the melody, I remembered why we never let him sing. But Doyle clearly recognised the snippet.

"Oh god, you've got it all wrong. It's not Beastie, it's _Bee-sting_ ," Doyle muttered, shifting in his chair as if embarrassed. "As in, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

"It's a beast of a song, though," piped up Dick. "I agree with Dieter. We should absolutely, positively record it." Wait, so now Dick was agreeing with Dieter? Was I in some kind of bizarro-Metropolis world?

"It's not finished," Doyle sputtered.

"Well," ventured Dieter, rising from the table and going to his gig bag, pulling out his own binder and a stack of CDs. "I have taken the liberty of scoring out some alternate arrangements..." Opening his binder - and hey, I didn't even know you could get binders in shiny black industrial leather like that - he handed out stacks of papers, stapled together in one corner, detailing not just Beastie or Bee-Sting or whatever it was called, but several of our songs, scored out in blocks of colour marked "verse" or "pre-chorus" or "middle 8" or "transitional chordal arrangement" and the like.

"What is this?" I asked, perplexed, not sure whether to be impressed or insulted as I saw how completely he'd reworked some of our new songs. "How did you work all this out?"

"Pete gave me a bootleg copy of Alsihad software a few months ago. You know, I was curious to learn how to operate a Digital Audio Workstation. So I've been teaching myself how to use it by going through some live recordings we made at soundchecks, editing them into tighter arrangements and more adventurous instrumentation."

"Well, let's hear it," suggested Dick, poking at the CDs to try and spy the track lists.

Dieter slapped his hands away, then took the piles of CDs over to the little stereo on a shelf unit. "Well, I started with _Nowhere Fast_ ," he explained, as he flipped the disc on. "As that's the song we've played the most. See, the chorus is fantastic, and the build-up is great on the verse, the way Dick keeps adding in more and more complex cross-rhythms. But then you go and blow all of that tension we've build, by adding in that stupid little pre-chorus and playing it too many times. Why build up the tension if you're going to spoil the release?"

"Hey," I protested. "It's not a stupid little pre-chorus, it's one of my favourite riffs."

Music spilled out of the tinny speakers, recognisably one of our soundcheck tapes, but augmented with extra bass and some keyboards. "It is a brilliant riff," Dieter agreed. I mean, at least he gave me that. "It's triumphant, almost orgasmic; it's got swagger. But it's totally in the wrong place within the composition's thematic development. So I ripped the melody out and moved it between the third chorus and the fade-out, building it into this big dynamic sturm and drang bit before passing into that anthemic last chorus. Much better than that weird, rambling bit that Doyle was muttering over."

"What the fuck?" demanded Doyle. "You can't just walk in and totally rewrite my song like that. It's not a 'muttery bit' - it's a spoken word poetry interlude. There's plot development in the middle 8, the denouement of the whole lyrical narrative..."

"If you want to write an epic poem or a novel, then write an epic poem or a fucking novel, poetry boy," shrugged Dieter, turning up the volume of the boombox. "This is a pop song, not T.S. Eliot's _The Wasteland_."

"Well, it's a wasteland now you've fucked it up," snarled Doyle.

"Wait, wait," I said, gesturing for them to be quiet so I could concentrate on the CD player. The editing was not great, to be honest, but still, I could see where Dieter was going with this. I'd always thrown in that little pre-chorus riff because I'd felt uncomfortable with the abruptness with which Dick shifted from verse to chorus, but Dieter was totally right about how it interrupted the tension and release of the song. Despite the roughness of the edit, it was, obviously, much smoother without the transition. And the Middle 8! Again, the editing was jerky, but he'd taken that little fuck-me riff I loved playing so much and expanded it, stretched it out, doubling it with keyboards and adding counterpoint on bass. It was brilliant. More than brilliant. Dieter had taken an already brilliant pop song, and made it exceptional. "This is actually great," I conceded. "I like this a lot. When we're set up, we should go upstairs and rehearse it like this..."

"So you're just going to cut out my best lyrical work, to stick in a guitar solo?" muttered Doyle, glaring at Dieter across the table.

"You're half-speaking that bit anyway. You said it was, I dunno, a tone poem or whatever. So why not speak it underneath the guitar solo instead?" I suggested, trying to placate my warring bandmates.

"You can't do a spoken word section underneath a guitar solo," Doyle sputtered.

"Why not?" I shrugged.

Doyle, for once, struggled for words. "Because... because it's a fucking pop song, not T.S. Eliot's _The Wasteland_ ," he snapped back, eyeing Dieter maliciously.

Dieter's eyes flashed, like he was totally up for the challenge, maybe even enjoying Doyle's outrage. "Well, consider it a Derridean _deconstruction_ of a pop song."

"Why... you... It's not _fair_!" Furiously, Doyle went to his own bag and started pulling out the Moleskins in which he wrote his lyrics. "You can't just come into my song, and rearrange everything... it's... fuck you, Dieter."

"Wait till you hear what I've done to _Last Exit To Brixton_ ," Dieter announced proudly, pushing fast-forward to our cod-reggae track. I almost laughed at the glee in his voice, like I had forgotten how much of a kick he got out of winding up Doyle. But then again, as he pressed play, and his whole face lit up, his eyes glinting, his pick-fingers tapping along with the beat of the song, I realised, this was more than just antagonising Doyle. Dieter had that old spark back; Dieter, too, was in love with these songs.

I grinned, and made an executive decision to go with that love, to harness Dieter's enthusiasm and his genuine excitement about the new material. "Doyle, it's fine," I said calmly. "He's always done this, remember? Like, even back in the front room of my old apartment on Ludlow Street, when we would sit and listen back to the live tapes from the Lacuna or Brownie's or wherever. And he's always been right. He's always been really good at arrangements, at pruning out the kinda boring bits and picking up the bits the crowd always goes wild at."

"Why thank you, Daniel, I do believe that is almost a compliment," crowed Dieter.

"Don't let it go to your head too much, old pal," muttered Doyle.

"Look, each of us brings our own specific strengths to this band," I argued diplomatically, ever the peacemaker. "I'm good at coming up with riffs, Doyle, you're great at writing amazing lyrics, Dick is, like, next-level at working in super-danceable beats, and Dieter..."

"Yes, Dieter is super-great at being a next-level attention whore who shoots his hot-damn super-mouth off in interviews," Doyle gushed, in blatant imitation of my accent and speech patterns.

I took a deep breath and chose to ignore that. "Dieter is our ideas man, he always has been. He is really good at the big picture stuff. Image. Design. Composition. And yes, arranging songs, and trimming out the fat is one of his many talents. So why don't we just go back into the rehearsal room, try it out live, and see how it works."

A few daggers were exchanged in glances between my singer and my bassist, before we finally all finished our coffee and moved back into the studio. I mean, Jesus Christ, my band would be amazing if I could ever get the to stop trying to tear each other apart.


	29. Rest My Chemistry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Daniel wrestles his band into the studio to start work on their follow-up album, he finds that the whole band's _chemistry_ has subtly changed, and his warring rhythm section are now best of buddies in the studio.
> 
> But when that special chemistry is revealed yet again to have _chemicals_ at its heart, and Daniel realises that he can no longer keep drugs from tearing his friends apart, the whole band is forced to make some difficult decisions as to their future.

By the end of the week, we were ready to load our stuff into a rented van, and drive out to Connecticut to start work on our second album. Cranbury now seemed familiar, almost comforting, as we reclaimed our bunkbeds in the loft and stowed our suitcases away in the attic that was to be our home for the next month. But this time, we'd got hip to the isolation of a Connecticut suburb. Dick had hired a rental car so we could occasionally get dinner somewhere that wasn't that dreadful Chinese restaurant at the end of the lane, or maybe even make quick dashes back to NYC if we really needed to.

We set up all together in the recording studio, in a kind of diamond formation, with baffles around the drumkit and vocals, but still able to all watch each other as we played. The chemistry was so perfect, we were honed so tight from so long on the road. And as much as Doyle bristled and hated to admit it, Dieter's arrangements of the news songs were perfect - especially _Nowhere Fast_ and _Bee-Sting_ \- they sizzled when we went over them, familiar enough for us to excel at playing them, but new enough to still be completely exciting.

But we started recording with _Ugly_ , since it was the simplest, and the most direct, not to mention the song that Dieter had made the fewest changes to, as the whole thing had just flowed out of Doyle's notebook, the moment I first started playing the chord progression, just on the bottom two strings of my guitar. Dick absolutely caught fire as soon as Dieter started playing the bassline, locking down the groove perfectly. But he pulled back, and slowed it down slightly from what I'd originally intended, changing it from a fast, punky, heat-seeking missile, to a sinuous, panther-like prowl. And as soon as Dick started playing it at that tempo, Doyle immediately snapped to, modulating his voice from an angry, Pixies-like yelp to a low, rasping growl that was really kinda... well, I dunno. If I were a girl, I'd have said it was kinda _sexy_. Dieter didn't like the new tempo, glancing suspiciously over at Dick, but after a couple of run-throughs, he seemed to warm up to the idea.

Dick and Dieter, man, oddly the aggression that had developed between them on tour seemed to heighten the musical rapport when they played. In the studio, Dieter and Dick were thick as thieves. In fact, it almost worried me when I'd catch them giggling together in the kitchen, as if at a private joke, before lapsing into barely contained silence at my arrival. But upstairs in the studio, Dick would get a groove on and hit his stride, and Dieter would dance back and forth against him almost like a choreographed fight - parry, feint, retreat, attack. Dieter wanted to finish the album as quickly as possible, and get back to the Lower East Side, so he worked like a fiend, the speed of his creativity dazzling us. 

Dieter didn't just play bass on the record; he also sketched in the keyboard parts that PCPete had first played live, but I was beginning to realise had originated with Dieter, rather than his druggy lackey. The speed and the fluidity with which Dieter took to the synths - even complicated MIDI bits he worked out on Alsihad - that really super-impressed me. (I mean, in the back of my mind, maybe I should have worried more that this focus was chemically sharpened?) But when he and Dick hit it, they really hit it - one, two takes, and that was it. Perfect; now move on. They worked like demons; and clad all in black, unwashed, unshaven, hair all sticking up on end, perhaps we were all starting to look a bit like demons, too.

I had forgotten the power of those all-night recording sessions, fuelled by black coffee and secondhand cigarette smoke, fag ash and drops of sweat mingling on the carpet. Even the Nag Champra that smouldered upstairs in the loft where we slept, it just sent me into that headspace where the only thing I could concentrate on was getting my thoughts down on tape in the form of slashing guitars and pummelling drums. For two weeks, we worked at a frenzied fever pace, the four of us locked in that magic groove that happened every time we were locked in a room. And every time I flopped down at the mixing desk and listened back to the rough mixes, my heart raced. This was it, this was fucking _it_.

We played around stylistically, stretching ourselves so much further than we had with the straight-ahead indie-rock of our first record. Mostly, that was down to our rhythm section, partly Dieter's flirtation with his beloved New Wave disco of Blondie and Duran Duran, but much more because Dick was currently going through a massive Dub phase, and dragging the whole band with him. It had been Dieter that started that, really, with that dumb cod-reggae mix of Last Exit To Brixton. Dieter had been pretty proud of himself for the wobbling basslines and heavy echo, but Doyle had started to snicker a bit halfway through.

"What?" Dieter challenged, drawing himself up to his full height and putting his hands on his hips. "You don't like Dub?"

"I love Dub," Dick drawled, reaching for a cigarette. "But you know jack shit about Reggae, Dee, and this ain't Dub."

"I do _so_ know about Dub," Dieter repined sulkily. "I've listened to tons of dub mixs. All of Bauhaus' _Burning From The Inside_ B-sides and remixes. The Curse's _In The Name Of Dub_ project. Public Image Ltd and _Black Market Clash_ and all the Don Letts material..."

"OK, now Don Letts knows dub, that's true," Dick pointed out. "But you know what the difference between PIL, Bauhaus and those dudes - and you?" He waited half a beat to take a drag of his cigarette, but not long enough for Dieter to reply. "David J and Jah Wobble and all those dudes - they listened to actual reggae. They listened to King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry and all the original shit, and they learned and absorbed that material. You, Dee? You listen to Bauhaus and The Clash and that _Dreadlock Holiday_ shit cod-reggae, and that's where you stop. So you end up with a copy of a copy of a copy. And it sounds _ridiculous_!"

Dieter looked more than slightly outraged, but really, there was not much he counter that with, though he tried valiantly. "Well, I do _own_ some Bob Marley records."

"Legend?" Dick's hoot of laughter was a perfectly articulate demonstration of his derision.

"And I've listened to a ton of Ska - The Specials and The Selector and all that Two-Tone and Northern Soul stuff that Daniel played constantly when he was going through his Mod phase at NYU..."

Dick stopped laughing and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. "Dee, do you want to learn about _real_ Dub?"

"Well..." I could tell that Dieter's curiosity was wrestling with his pride. "Yes."

Looking down at his watch, Dick stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. "Right. You and I are getting in the rental car, and driving back to Brooklyn to pick up some of my minidisks."

"Wait, wait," I protested. "You can't just go barrelling off, we're in the middle of a session!"

"Come on, Boss, we're done for the day. This time of night it'll take an hour and a half, maybe two at the most, to nip to Brooklyn and back." Dick was already on his feet, with Dieter close on his heels.

And so began the unlikely alliance between the members of our rhythm section. Dick and Dieter arrived back in Cranbury some time after midnight, giggling to themselves as they crept up the stairs, then set themselves up in the control room, smoking and burning incense as Dick hooked his minidisk player up to the studio speakers, the heavy basslines shaking their way up through the floor and shaking me out of bed. After a couple of days of these late-night "study-sessions" Doyle joined in, and _Last Exit To Brixton_ turned steadily from ridiculous cod-reggae to something darker and weirder and more beautiful. And yeah, there was a definite change from the basslines we recorded during the first half of the sessions, with their aggressive growl, to the basslines from the second half of the sessions, much deeper and more resonant, with an almost sensual swing to them.

After about a week of this, I figured, if you can't beat them, might as well join them, and crept back down the loft's ladder after being unable to sleep through the juddering basslines of Prince Far I or Burning Spear or whoever Dick was playing that night. But as I stood in my pyjamas at the bottom of the ladder, I sniffed at the pungent aroma of Nag Champra, realising I'd been taken for a complete mug.

"Come on, guys," I said loudly, breaking the smokey spell of the music. "Where is it? Hand it over."

For a few moments, there was panic and paranoia, as three heads swivelled towards me, eyes bugging out, as three pairs of hands moved to quickly waft away smoke. "We don't have anything, Boss. Don't know what you're talking about. No idea."

"No idea, no idea," echoed Dieter dreamily, his eyes slits. "Irie, Asheton, Irie."

I turned to Doyle, who was wobbling slightly, his eyes watering as he tried very hard not to react, but he would not speak to me. "Come on, hand it over."

Doyle shrugged lightly, and shook his head, but remained silent as I stared at him.

"Dude, you realise you have smoke coming out of your ears?" I observed.

Suddenly, Doyle exploded in a coughing fit, opening his mouth in a huge plume of smoke as he gingerly extracted the still-lit joint from inside. "Shit, Old Man, you nearly made me burn my tongue."

"Have you forgotten that I saw you pull that trick nearly a hundred times, dodging teachers at Collegiate?" I reminded him, as I took the joint from him and held it in one hand, glaring at it as the three men around me giggled like stoned teenage boys. "I mean, come on, guys. What is this shit?"

"Do I have detention, Mr Asheton?" laughed Doyle in a little-boy voice, even as he tapped his tongue lightly with his fingertips to make sure he had not injured himself.

"Fuck you, Saunders. I'm not mad you have a fucking joint. I'm mad you didn't _offer_ me any." And with that, I took a deep drag, drawing the smoke into my lungs, then sunk down to the control room sofa, feeling the swirling delay of the music echo around my head. Oh yeah, now that was much better. There was no way I was going to muddy my head with this shit when we were trying to mix or record, but to relax, and clear my head of the day's music, there was nothing better.

"Come on, Boss, pass it over."

"No fucking way. You guys had a half hour head start." Sinking deeper into the pillows of the sofa, I took another draw and felt myself drifting gently away.

From then on, the "Study Sessions" became a nightly way of relaxing. I wouldn't hit the sack immediately, I'd stay up a bit and hang out while Dick put on one of his Dub mixes, and we'd just chill together, taking in a smoke and the music. I mean, I was a total lightweight, and often fell asleep on the sofa to find my bandmates long gone. But on the whole, it was totally worth it for a peaceable, functioning band who all seemed to be getting on well - _really_ well, in our rhythm section's case - especially compared to the chaos of the last tour. I was just happy that my band seemed happy, and the sessions were progressing well.

 

\----------

 

But a couple of weeks into recording, once all of the backing tracks (bass, drums and rhythm guitars, plus some keyboards) were down for about a dozen songs, there was a disaster in the rhythm section. Dick, who had, unbeknownst to me, somehow lapsed back onto both amphetamines and booze, crashed his car on the drive back from an illicit overnight bar-crawl he had sworn he never intended to be on. What a fucking fool I had been, to think that my bandmates, after the debauchery of the last tour, would stick to nothing harder than cannabis for very long. Those "study sessions" weren't chill-outs, they were _come-downs_ from the cocktails of pharmaceuticals that Dick and Dieter had been using to power through the sessions. What a mug I was, what an utter fucking _muppet_. And suddenly, instead of floating in a cloud of ganja and space echo, I was in an overly air conditioned taxi headed for the local sheriff's station, fingering my chequebook and wondering if Musketeer would spring for Dick's bail, if necessary.

Once the police got involved, Dick's facade of confidence and control completely crumbled. It was at this point, after I paid his speeding fine - and he only narrowly avoiding being arrested for a DUI charge on a technicality, because the policeman had fluffed the Breathalyzer results - and called the insurance company for the rental car, that he finally confessed to me. This was not the first time he'd fallen foul of narcotics. He had run with a bad crowd in Texas, and been seriously addicted to amphetamine back in the music scene there. In fact, the biggest reason he had originally upped sticks and moved from Dallas to New York, was not actually Jessica, it was to try and shake off rough friends and associations that reminded him of the drug. He could run away from Dallas, and then run away from New York, but clearly he could not run away from his own demons.

"Boss, I got to come clean with you," Dick informed me, rubbing his bleary eyes in a taxi back from the Connecticut Sheriff's Station. He looked rough, dark rings under his eyes, and the bruises from the car crash coming in across his shoulder and the side of his neck where the seatbelt had saved his life. "This has been a wake-up call. I nearly died back there, boss. That fence post I hit came through the windshield six inches from where I was sitting."

"it was an accident, Dick. It was not a judgement from God. Just lay off the drinking." I had to admit, the crash, the sight of Dick's completely totalled car with a fence post impaling the passenger seat where I frequently sat on our drives into Stamford, that had scared me, too, but I knew everything was fine when he just didn't drink.

"I shouldn't even have been driving in that state! I did not even realise how fucking drunk I was, when I got in that car. It was the fucking speed, and Jesus fucking Christ, I am lucky the cops didn't test for drugs or I would still be in jail right now."

"Well, just calm down. We'll keep you in the studio, and we'll keep an eye on you. I mean, at least without that car, you won't be able to sneak off again. Just stay in the studio, and everything will be fine." I didn't like the idea of having to babysit my own drummer to keep him from sneaking off on binges, but if that was what it would take to keep my band together to finish the session, that was what I would do.

"I can't, boss. This whole... Metropolis... _Dieter_... the atmosphere in the studio... this is _toxic_ for me right now. I need to not be around you guys. I need to go home. I need to get the hell out of Dodge! I'm going to wind up dead, if I stay around this much longer."

"Dick," I hedged, feeling torn. "You know we love you, and we want you well. But are you sure?"

"I have never been more sure of anything in my life," he insisted as the cab turned down the drive of the recording studio. "If I don't confront these demons and sort my head out, I am dead. I have been on this road before, I know where it goes. And confronting my demons means going back to Dallas and sorting out my life. ASAP. As Soon As Possible."

"Back to _Dallas_?" I stuttered, reaching in my wallet for money to pay the cab driver. "You can't work on the album if you're in Dallas!"

"Nah, don't turn off the meter," Dick told the driver, leaning forward and waving my cash away. "Stay here, I'll be right down, I gotta go up and get my stuff, but then you're driving me to the airport."

"Airport? No way!" I thrust the money at the driver, who accepted it with a shrug, but did not turn off the meter. "Dick, we can talk about this..." I turned back to the taxi driver as Dick climbed out of the car. "Take off, man, we're done."

"We're not done. Stay here!" Dick ordered, and I guess he sounded more imposing than I did, because the cab driver stayed.

"Dick, what about the album?" I demanded, following Dick up the stairs and tailing him about the studio as he stuffed his clothes into a gym bag. The place was deserted, as if they'd broken for lunch, probably down at the Chinese restaurant again. Perhaps if Doyle or even Dieter had been there, we could have ganged up on him, talked him into staying, but the empty studio stood, forlorn. "Are you going to finish the album with us?" I repeated as we crossed the mixing room. For a moment, he wavered at the desk, looking through the studio window at his Gretsch kit, still set up in the main recording room, but then he shook his head. If he was leaving his kit, that meant he was coming back, didn't it?

"My drum parts are all down. It'll be fine, boss."

"What if we need overdubs? What if we need you in the mixing process?" I rattled on, as I followed him back down the stairs and out to the street.

"Dan!" Dick turned round abruptly, and put a hand on each of my shoulders, forcing me to look up into his face. "What do you care more about? Getting this album finished, or my health, and my fucking life?"

"Dick, I would think that was fucking obvious... of course your..." I started to protest, trying to sound concerned for his health.

"Don't even fucking answer that." Dick cut me off, shaking me gently. "I have got to go." And with that, he turned and left, slinging his gym bag into the back seat of the cab before following with his body. "Take me to the nearest airport."

"Dick!" I howled after the retreating taxi, as it disappeared back down the driveway in a cloud of dust. "What is this? Have you quit? Are you coming back? Are you still our drummer, or do have to start the whole shitting process of looking for a new drummer all over the fuck again? Dick, you can't just quit, you're one of us now. I can't fucking do this without you! You're the only sane one in this fucking band! Diiiiiiick!"

But the car drove off and disappeared into the distance, leaving me, furious and abandoned, kicking at rocks in the gravel parking lot. Had he quit the band? Was he coming back at all? I didn't even fucking know, and at that point, I resolved not to even fucking care, I just wanted to finish the damn record, wanted to hew those unfinished rough mixes into the diamond sounds I heard in my head.

Without Dick, Dieter went into open rebellion. During our breaks from touring, Charlene had been letting him DJ before the bands went on at the Lacuna Lounge, but now he had been offered an opening slot at Limelight's weekly Goth Bat-Dance. So he informed me breezily that he had far better things to do with his time than sit around a stinking studio in Connecticut, listening to Doyle and me argue about reverb gates. 

So the band abandoned the session halfway through and decamped back to New York, where I sat in my loft, brooding and obsessively listening to the rough mixes over and over, planning how to polish them into shape. Because the tracks, man, I knew at least that the tracks, no matter how rough they were, could be polished and whipped into my shape. But at that point, I was no longer certain that I could be sure of the same thing, regarding my bandmates.

 

\----------

 

After a few days back in New York, I received the phone call I'd been both praying for, and dreading. "Am I speaking to Daniel Asheton?" asked a woman's voice, an older woman, with a thick Texan twang.

"One and the same," I told her, feeling I should be on my best behaviour. "With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?"

"This is Deborah Sticciano." She said it with the same lilting pronunciation as Dick, and I wondered if this was his mother... sister... some other relation? Dick's life before he'd come to New York was a total mystery to me. "I'm Ricardo's momma."

"Oh, Mrs Sticciano," I said, with a sigh of relief. "How is Dick? I mean, Ricardo. We've all been very worried about him."

"Call me Debbie, please," she said with a little laugh, and for a moment I tried to imagine some Southern Belle, with Dick's electric blue eyes. But then her voice grew serious again. "Look, I'm not going to lie to you. My son has been very ill. We talked, and we've cleared it with your record company's insurance company, and he's agreed to enter a rehab, a residential one up near Fort Worth."

"A rehab?" I tried to keep the shock out of my voice. Though really, what else had I been expecting? This had not proved to be the kind of thing he could realistically handle on his own. "How long is he going to be in for?" I blurted out, still thinking of our album, and the touring obligations that would come with it.

"Well, the minimum stay is 28 days. Though they did warn us he could be in for up to three months, depending on how long he takes to get well... Aw, jeez, listen to us. ' _in for._ ' He's hardly in jail, he's in a very advanced medical facility, getting vital care."

I cringed internally at my own gaffe. "Yes, of course." Casting about blindly, I tried to think of something to say to a woman whose son had just been committed to a hospital for maybe up to three months. Never mind the band, that had to be difficult. Oh, shit, the band. I should probably say something on their behalf. "You know that all of us in Metropolis are pulling for Dick. There's a lot of respect - and a lot of love - that all of us hold for your son."

"That means a lot to me - I'm sure it means a lot to us both. I'll be sure and tell Ricardo next time I speak to him."

"And if there's anything that I, or the band, can do for Dick, please let us know," I added, trying to charm my way out of my previous faux pas.

"Actually, there is something you can do for him."

Fear gripped my stomach, as I suddenly wondered if she was going to ask me to fly down to Dallas, visit him in hospital, oh christ, I hated hospitals. The places gave me the fucking willies, from the first time I'd gone to see Grandpa Davis in the Royal Free in Hampstead, after his stroke. "Anything," I said nervously, adjusting my tie.

"You know, my son has been playing in bands since he was 14 years old. I know how these things work, I know the pressure for a gigging band - and I can't imagine how much higher that pressure must be at your level. I mean, we're all very proud of Metropolis and your success, everyone back here in Dallas has been rooting for you, and buying your album like crazy..."

I swallowed nervously, and knew I had to tread carefully here. Did that mean that Dick was quitting, for real this time? Was that why she was beating around the bush so subtly? Christ, I could not handle the thought of trying to find another drummer. Step carefully, Asheton, step carefully. "Well, thank you. We appreciate the support. And please know, that we are very aware, that your son's talent is an integral part of Metropolis' success."

"I had hoped you did. Which makes this easier to ask. Because I do know this is a big thing to ask, Mr Asheton..."

"Please, it's _Daniel_. Mr Asheton is my Dad." I knew Dick was 2 or 3 years older than me, so it completely weirded me out to be addressed as Mr Asheton by his _mother_.

"Daniel, I know my son lives for your band. He feels that his band is the single biggest accomplishment of his life; the thing he is the most proud of. When we were trying to get him admitted to rehab, he told me that his weightiest objection was the fear that Metropolis would fire him if he had to go away for a month or more. Now I know it's a lot to ask, but I am afraid that without a... No, let me put that another way." My head reeled as Debbie cleared her throat. Wait. Dick was afraid that _we_ were going to sack him?

"But Mrs. Stich... Debbie, he was the guy who told me, to my face, that Metropolis was a toxic atmosphere for him, and he had to - and I quote - get the hell out of Dodge." I had replayed that conversation in a mind a hundred times over the past week.

"Daniel, I know what motivates my son. He likes to think of himself as a dependable guy, the kind of guy that other people rely on. If he thought that he still had a band, a job, a life, waiting for him, once he got out of rehab, that would give him a hell of a motivation - excuse my French - to get his act together and clean up. But if he thought that he was fired... well, I'm not sure that wouldn't make him a whole lot worse."

"Fire him?" I stuttered. "Debbie, I thought that he had quit!"

"If he said that, that was the drugs talking. I know my son. And I know this is a lot to ask, but please... if it's at all in your power, can you keep that drum stool open for him, until he comes back?"

I sank down to my sofa, rubbing my forehead with thumb and forefinger to try and smooth out the almost perpetual worry lines that were starting to form there. The accountant in me knew there was no way to even do a cost-benefit analysis on this. Dick was our drummer, he was the guy that had been _born_ to play with us. The thought of even looking for another drummer just made my head spin. Whatever thin rope of hope that Mrs Sticciano was holding out to us, I was prepared to take it. "OK, you got a deal. You tell Dick that drum stool is his, as long as he wants it. But you also tell Dick that all three of us are rooting for him to get better and come back to us, ASAP - as soon as possible - as he would say."

Debbie's relief was almost palpable, even down the long distance connection of the phone. "I will make sure to tell him you said that, Daniel. And thank you."

Putting the phone down with my best regards, I massaged my temples until the vein stopped throbbing in my forehead, then walked over to my five grand stereo to play the rough mixes of our album one more time. Just to remind myself, to make absolute sure that this had been the right decision.

The drums were perfect, absolutely spot on - and I marvelled at how Dick had still been able to play like a monster, even while fighting two addictions - but the bass on the earlier songs, the pre "Dub Study Sessions" songs (especially my favourite song, _Ugly_ , the one we were already marking as the first single) was still... well, it was sloppy. It wasn't up to scratch. Like, I knew how these songs sounded live, how they sizzled and growled as Dieter and Dick pushed and pulled the rhythm back and forth between them, but weirdly, the studio version sounded oddly lifeless. And it wasn't even the slowed-down tempo, which sounded great with the guitars and even just with Doyle's scratch vocals. It was definitely the bassline that was wrong, especially compared to the later, dubbier stuff. I knew how much was resting on our Difficult Second Album - and I saw what Deltawave had been through with theirs - and I knew we would only get one shot to make this perfect.

So I did what I always did when I was troubled. I emailed my girlfriend, bitching about being stranded back in NYC when I desperately wanted to be in the studio finishing off our stalled album.

Merry didn't even bother to disguise her pleasure. 'You mean you're in New York this week? What excellent timing. I've got 5 whole days off between the end of our European tour and the start of our South American one. I was going to fly down to Rio to work on my tan, but if you're there, stay put; I'll come home. See you soon, love you madly XOXO'

OK, so at least I'd be getting laid on my unplanned holiday. That cheered me up slightly - alright, more than slightly, when she offered me _certain_ special sexual favours if I'd come and meet her off the plane at JFK. I always had a soft spot for JFK, that first sight of the city over the horizon as you flew in over Long Island, and the only thing better than that final stretch after Immigration and past the baggage reclaim was seeing my girlfriend's blonde head bobbing towards me, waving like a maniac when she saw me. And I grinned and waved back like a maniac that was going to get, well... _you know_... later. So I kissed her and carried her bag and put her in the taxi and took her home, beaming with pride as we snuggled together in the back of the cab. Hot damn, did I have a party planned for tonight.

But when we finally crawled out of bed and I played the rough mixes for Merry, she frowned at _Ugly_. "The song is great, totally a single, that's a banging beat - but you're right. That bass is all wrong."

"You're not just saying that because you hate Dieter?" I mused, scratching the scruffy studio beard I had started to sport after a few weeks of recording too intense to bother shaving.

"I don't hate Dee. I think he's quite funny, mostly." Her words oddly echoed Dick's. It was funny how people kept expressing affection for Dieter, even when they clearly wanted to beat the shit out of him. "But that bass isn't doing it for me. You want something more like..." Walking over to her bass, which she'd left casually out on a stand by our bed, she picked it up and started thumbing out a walking disco bassline, adding a few octave-hops as she went. "Think of Dieter, think of how he walks, think of how he struts onstage. You don't want this plodding 4/4 thing. You want something that... swings, that prowls like a panther. Your new material screams brash confidence. This music has swagger. You want a bassline that _struts_." She was smiling now as she played, embellishing the bass riff with frills and pick-up notes that the austere Dieter would never have tolerated.

"Oh my god. Play that again?" I moved back to the stereo and hit rewind on the tape, then got out a sheaf of paper as Merry played the new bassline, tabbing down the frets and making notes of where the trills should be. "Can I just have that for a second?" Merry handed over the instrument and I slung it round my shoulders, feeling for the notes, doing my best to imitate the casual insouciance of Merry's bassline, adding a bit of Dieter's coke-head arrogance to it. Yes, she was totally right; that worked so much better.

When Merry had gone again, I rang Terry to ask if we could come back into the studio and re-start the aborted sessions, then called my bandmates. Terry was fine with it, and Doyle was up for going back to the studio, as he was clearly bored, but Dieter refused point blank to go. He had an important DJ gig at a party that Z-Man had organised in LA, and he was not missing it for the world.

"It's my first headlining gig," he explained over the phone, his voice rising excitedly. "My name in lights above the Viper Room - DJ Dieter."

"Dieter from Metropolis," I corrected. For fucks sake, the guy could at least get in a plug for the band if his extracurricular activities were going to detract from our studio work.

"No way. I don't know need 'Metropolis' behind my name for people to know who I am. Do people say 'Iggy from the Stooges' or do they just say 'Iggy Pop'? I'm bigger than Metropolis now."

Bigger than Metropolis, was he? "Fuck it," I said, and dug through the lumber room until I found Merry's spare bass, an old Rickenbacker she never took on tour. I found her ebow, and grabbed that, too. An hour later, Doyle and I were in a taxi back to Cranbury, with the bass in the trunk of the car.

"You're really going to overdub Dieter's bassline," Doyle said, marvelling at my sheer bloody-mindedness.

"Yes, I am," I insisted, and plugged the Rickenbacker into Dieter's cabinet, adjusting the EQ to tone down the transients and boost the Rick's growling mid-range. And with the tab down on paper in front of me and visions of Merry's hips dancing in my head, I re-recorded what Dieter should have been playing, what Dieter took great pains to _look_ like he was playing. I played that bassline that Merry had come up with in our loft, a bouncing, swaggering, sexy pseudo-disco bassline with an ego like an 80s rock star swigging champagne on a yacht. I worked quickly, overdubbing first one guitar, then another, adding rhythmic bursts in one passage, then weird, floaty ebow parts to another, blending the whole thing together like a heady mixture that might have come from Z-Man's fountain. Then Doyle went into the vocal isolation booth, and he crooned over the top, singing his heart out about ugliness and evil and the joy of being _bad_ , a passionate love letter to the absent Auntie Beast that churned my stomach, even as it tugged at my hips to dance.

The three of us, Doyle, Terry and I, got down to business in the studio. Without our bickering rhythm section, Doyle and I worked with a single-mindedness that could move mountains. I walled myself up in the main recording studio with my amps, nailing guitar take after take, moving ruthlessly from one song to the next, building up the layers until the tracks sizzled. Then Doyle went into the iso booth with his headphones and his cigarettes and threw back his head and sung.

And my god, could Doyle really _sing_ now. In the early days of Metropolis, he'd always kind of shouted everything, partly out of habit, because we always had to shout to be heard over the roar of those little East Village clubs, and partly because he was never really confident in his voice or his abilities as a lyricist. But working in bigger venues with better mics and monitors, Doyle had started to develop a real _range_. And more importantly, over the past year and a half, he had developed confidence. Although he still tantrumed and chucked his headphones across the room screaming " _fuck, fuck, fuck_ " when he fucked up a lyric, he was no longer quite so fucking precious about burying his voice. He sung, he crooned, he soared, he roared, depending on what the song needed.

You know, fuck Dieter and Dick and their mutiny. It was me and Doyle that were the nucleus of the band, the creative heart of the band. And in that studio, we whipped that album into shape, finished recording in another two and a half weeks, then sat down to mix.

Mixing was a fucking bitch, but I was really, truly ambitious for what I wanted to achieve. When mixing the first album, Terry had sat in the centre of the desk, and Doyle and I had sat on either side, making comments or recommendations. But now I sat in the centre, trying to make use of everything Barry had taught me, and Terry sat to the side, only occasionally tweaking the faders as I shaped the swirling mass of sound into what I heard in my head.

Doyle stared at the speakers as we mixed the tracks. "This sounds completely evil."

"It doesn't sound evil, it sounds _wicked_ ," I corrected, with British intonation to highlight the word's other meaning - brash, bold and unspeakably cool.

" _Wicked_ ," repeated Doyle. "Now you're just _quibbling over semantics_ ," he added, stabbing at the air with his cigarette in a note-perfect parody of Dieter's catch-phrase, right down to his pretentious faux-British accent. He and I looked at each other, and burst out laughing. The band might scrap like cats and dogs on the road, but when it came to recording, our heads just aligned with single-minded purpose. "We should call the fucking album Semantics."

"No. No way. Too much like Weightless Semiotics." I shook my head decisively, though I had to admit I did kinda like it. Semantics was the kind of album title that made sense for a little arthouse band like Metropolis. "Merry would be so annoyed. She'd kill me."

"Merry is never annoyed by anything you do, ever. That girl thinks the sun shines out of your ass." Doyle rolled his eyes and I couldn't shake the feeling that he somehow _idolised_ Mary.

"As if," I snorted, winding the track back and replaying it again. Doyle's tumbling wordplay totally sounded like quibbling semantics.

"It would annoy the shit out of Dieter, though," Doyle goaded.

We called the album _Semantics_. 

 

Without the rest of the band in the way, Doyle and I finished it in a matter of weeks, ahead of schedule for a change. But we used the spare time to get us a bit of press, inviting Sound On Sound to the studio, ostensibly to do a feature on Terry and Cranberry Sound, but really it was all about Metropolis, with lavish photos of Doyle and I sitting at the mixing desk, my fingers on the faders, all serious and bearded. I loved hanging out in that tiny panelled control room, listening to the finished mixes blasting out loud over the speakers, pretending that we were really in the cathedral room of Catskills Mansions. Considering the resources we had available, I thought I had done a pretty damn amazing job.

It sounded nothing like Metropolis. Well, no, it sounded like a bad, evil, spruced-up twin brother of Metropolis, all slicked back hair and power suits, rather than the shaggy indie Metropolis of the first album. But it was good. It was so fucking good. In my heart, I knew that it was right. It sounded brash, and slick, and _ugly_ , but in the same compulsively attractive way that Auntie Beast had been sexy as fuck.

But the big question was going to be: could we sell this _wicked_ , spruced-up, power-suited evil twin brother of Metropolis to our little indie record label, and more importantly - could we sell it to our fans? That thought did bother me, and maybe I spent a few extra days more than I really needed, listening, tweaking, and trying to work out if I really had the guts to turn this in. Finally, when I could not find one more tweak to make on it, we sent it off to Gerry to await his verdict.

"You guys..." Gerry hedged over the phone. "I almost want to stop you from releasing this. Your old fans, they are going to _hate_ this."

"I know," I sighed. It was like a deliberate slap in the face, stripping off the reverb and the murky, shoegaze distortion to replace it with those slick, candy-toned production tricks I had learned from Barry. "But our new fans, they are going to more than make up for it. Trust me on this."

"I do trust you, but Danny-boy, are you sure?"

I took a deep breath and took some time to think it over. Actually, I was not sure. In point of fact, I had posted a cassette tape of the rough mixes to Sandra and the Becks, under pain of death or being sacked if the album leaked, in order to secure the opinions of real long-term fans who had been with us since the start. Sandra had been beside herself with enthusiasm, emailing 'This is absolutely amazing. I think you've made the same kind of stylistic leap, both in aesthetics and songwriting quality, that Slur made between _Pleasure_ and _Modernity_. This is the band I always knew you guys could be, from the very first time I saw you guys in the back of the Camden Falcon. But you've got to know that this is going to be controversial, even in the Metropolist office.'

'Controversial?' I emailed back, worried. 'How so?'

'I absolutely love it,' she wrote. 'I have not taken it off my stereo since I got it. And Becca, though she initially thought it wasn't as good as _Lights! Camera! Action!,_ decided she loved it after about the third or fourth listen. She's totally converted, thinks the drumming on this album is even better than the debut, that the new disco and ska and dub-inflected rhythm section totally makes it. But Becky... I think she's totally nuts, but she hates it. In fact, she says she'll quit the team and go work for Radioshack's management if you guys release this record the way it is.'

I must admit, I had done a massive wobble over that. I had gone home and listened first to _Lights! Camera! Action!_ on my five grand stereo, with the speakers turned all the way up, then played _Semantics_. Then I dug out Merry's Slur albums and listened to _Pleasure_ followed by _The Litter of Modernity_. True, _Modernity_ had sold shit compared to _Pleasure_ , but it had been a critical smash, and their third album, _Common Touch_ had not just gone Platinum in the UK, but crossed over to score a hit in the US, too. Then I had popped out to J &R Music World and bought a copy of the new Radioshack album, _Plan B_. Christ, no, this was shit! Becky must have lost her mind. This was nothing but ambient soundscapes and bleepy techno noises, like one of Merry's weird Aphex Twin records played at the wrong speed. Where the fuck were the guitars? The tunes? I put _Semantics_ back on my stereo and felt a swell of relief. _Ugly_ had big, massive guitar riffs, and tunes for miles, and an anthemic chorus you could sing along with. Becky was nuts; let her go.

I rang Gerry back with renewed self assurance. "I have never been more sure of anything in my life. _Semantics_ is perfect the way it is." It was like a obsessive mania that had been triggered in me. I loved Merry, and I knew that Merry loved me, just the way I was, whether that was as an accountant, or broke-ass indie-rocker or whatever. But there was a part of me that could not look my girlfriend in the face until I had sold as many records as she had. "We're doing this, and we're going all the way."


	30. Metropolis Sell Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Metropolis make preparations for the release of their hotly anticipated second album, _Semantics_. First, Daniel hires a manager, who has plans to hijack this new "internet" technology to push their first single. Daniel and Doyle undergo "media training" to try and overcome Dieter's habit of dominating interviews and get their views across. But as the routine of press promotion bites hard, is Doyle getting cold feet?

First thing I did, I hired a manager. Up until that point, I had handled everything, well, me and Gerry, until eventually Tony took over the road management duties. I had made the plans and handled the contacts, and Gerry had provided the wherewithal, and together we had steered a course. But now, having seen how much of a difference having a road manager made on tour, I wanted an expert to take over the day to day running of Metropolis. Yes, Daniel the control freak was going to hand over the reigns to someone else. 

No, seriously! Not that I wanted someone to make the aesthetic decisions, but I needed someone else to make the business decisions. Things were getting out of hand - and not just Dick's drug habit, or Dieter's habit of shooting his mouth off in the press. I wanted a proper manager - not a shark like Michael - but someone who knew as much about making a band _happen_ as Barry knew about making a recording leap off the speakers and sizzle. So I asked around. I schmoozed, I networked, and I called in favours from Bebe and Barry and held interviews and auditioned potentials until I found the _one_. And actually, despite all my new, music industry connections, it was, once again, Charlene from the Lacuna that put me in touch with the manager we ended up hiring.

Taylor was a bit older than us, maybe early 30s, but not too old to not care about _cool_ any more, all black clothes and pale, powder-white skin and an asymmetrical hairdo, though she was just ever so slightly too chubby to be a full-on rock chick. But her weight seemed to give her a kind of presence; as soon as she spoke, it was obvious she was no mascara-smeared airhead. She'd played drums in several bands back in the early 90s, some of them signed, then moved to the A &R side. She'd worked at indies, then she'd worked for a couple of majors before branching out into management, but she had been well known, in and around the Lower East Side scene, for as long as I'd been in it.

It was Taylor who had introduced the formerly hopeless Rocket Pops to their heartthrob singer, Jeremy Kane, whose cheekbones and candy-apple hair had so impressed MTV, and moved them from playing shitty bars to playing stadiums. But then she'd had them nicked off her by a dishonest asshole once they signed to a major. The asshole, Eric, had run the band into the ground, touring them too hard, letting them get into drugs and unhealthy romantic relationships, and Jeremy had joined the 27 Club with a fatal heroin overdose the previous summer. "That would not have happened, had I still been working with that band," Taylor insisted defiantly. "Kate Charms told me that Eric was supplying him with drugs to bribe him to get to gigs! That's insane. I would have staged an intervention, cancelled the tour, got him into rehab. He would be alive."

Jeremy's death was, in some ways, still reverberating through the Ludlow Street scene a year later, as none of our bands were untouched by the sticky, tar-black hand of heroin. Loads of people were known to have dabbled - not just Blandford Lannings and Doyle - rumours also swirled around about a couple of the Sugarpussy guys and the singer of the Charms. But Jeremy had been a shock, the first of the gang to die. I never really trusted the guy, to be honest, ever since that whole business at the Continental, but it was a shitty way for someone we knew to go. It hadn't been a surprise, but it was still a shock, if you know what I mean.

We'd been cocooned on tour when it happened, we'd played Leeds the day before them and Reading the day after, but I hadn't even found out about it until we got back to New York. The rumour mill had gone into overdrive, and at one point no one was quite sure if it was suicide or an accidental overdose - well, until they found the note saying his girlfriend had left him. Kate Charms, Dieter's old bete noir, had tired of the drugs and the drama, and dumped him to run off with the pretty-boy bass player from Slur. Taylor railed at the complete and total waste of a blinding talent, though, secretly, I kinda suspected that the Rocket Pops were selling just as well in the afterlife, maybe even better now that Kane was seen as a symbol of doomed love, a tragic Romeo figure who died to keep punk rock pure.

"I want that," I told her over drinks in the front booth of the Lacuna, just for old time's sake. "Well, obviously not the overdose in a British hotel room and my girl running off with one of Slur." I scratched my studio beard thoughtfully as I thought about Merry's crush on Graham Cooper. "But I want the kind of fame that the Rocket Pops achieved and then blew. I want to go on MTV and still be thought of as punk rock. I want Doyle as a heartthrob on the cover of Smash Hits, and Dieter's haircut in so many style magazines that even housewives in Ohio know who he is. I don't care if we have to do soundtracks and adverts like Deltawave are doing... I want us to be that big."

"Deltawave?" Taylor shrugged. Come on, she knew I was dating Merry from Deltawave; everyone in the East Village knew that, despite Michael's increasingly ridiculous strictures on Merry talking about her private life. "Deltawave are not doing that great, to be honest. There are problems with Weightless Semiotics, Windlass are not exactly happy with the sales so far."

"Elisha," I whistled softly. I knew all about the problems and the doubts; Merry whispered them to me via email every night. "Elisha is sabotaging his own band's chances of success, because of his ego. He resents the fact that Merry is the Face of that band, and not him. Me, I have no ego. If you want to make Doyle the Face, make Doyle the Face. If you want to make Dieter the Face, make Dieter the Face. Better yet, make both of them Faces, and double the exposure."

"I like the way you think," Taylor observed, with a wolfish smile. "So tell me. What's not on the table? What's the Faustian bargain you won't strike? You're happy to get into bed with MTV?"

"To be frank, at this point, I am prepared to suck MTV's cock for airplay," I quipped.

"How about advertisements? Would you allow companies to use your music in commercials? It's hugely lucrative - just one spot would pay for the tourbus on your next tour - and it can be great exposure, but I understand some artists feel kind funny about hawking computers or shoes."

"Tricky," I mused, wondering what my 16 year old Minor Threat fan former self would have made of this dilemma. But my 16 year old self didn't have a mortgage to make. "I think it would depend on the company, to be honest. After all, we got naked for KROQ billboards so it's not as if we're not prepared to sell ourselves. I think it comes down to... do we actually use the product, could we see ourselves using the products. I could see us doing an advert for Compaq or Apple or whoever, because I use their products, my laptop goes everywhere with me. And I suppose, Dieter has been wearing Doc Martens since the day I met him..."

"They have asked," Taylor noted, writing something down on her notepad. "Their target market are too hip, too alternative to respond to something like an ad, but they asked if you were willing to do some in-stores, be photographed wearing their shoes, in exchange for a fee, or for merchandise?"

"I think you'd be hard pressed to get a photo of Dieter _not_ wearing their shoes. But seriously, in the early days, we did a tour sponsored by a trainer manufacturer, and none of us would be caught dead wearing trainers. That doesn't bother me. We'll take it on a case by case basis."

"What about the softer stuff, the grey area stuff. You know, product placement, endorsement, wearing Hugo Boss in your videos, flashing the brands of certain cigarette packages or beer brands onstage and in interviews?"

"I don't personally smoke, but Doyle, Dieter and Dick will smoke whatever you goddamn tell them to," I found myself promising. "Hugo Boss? No. But Hedi Slimane at Dior or Helmet Lang? Now we're talking. And if you want to get me an endorsement deal with Electroharmonix or Death By Audio, hot damn, I'm theirs for free pedals."

"Would you leave Musketeer for a major label?"

"Well, not for this record, it's already scheduled and I think Musketeer is right for this record, we still need their DIY image, especially with a record this slick sounding. But in the future? Who knows. I'm open to suggestions."

"You're not afraid of all those... accusations of 'Selling Out'?" she probed.

The 16 year old Minor Threat fan inside me howled in protest, but I quelled him with a sip of the aged Gaelic whisky that Barry had taught me to appreciate. I had learned to drink, and to smoke pot, and to fuck, oh boy, had Merry ever taught me how to _fuck_. And my life was keeping up infinitely better now than I had ever _fucking thought_ , at 16. "You know what? If Selling Out means we tour in a proper bus, with a kitchen, and toilet, and beds, instead of a stinky van; if Selling Out means I live in a luxurious loft in Soho instead of a cramped bedsit on Ludlow Street; if Selling Out means we get to record in a nice studio, with reel to reel tape and vintage compressors instead of some piss-stained shithole underneath the Pink Pony, then please... bring on Selling Out. Where do I sign up."

"Think. Is there anything, any notion of authenticity or credibility that you will not give up to make this happen? Is there anything you won't sacrifice? Think carefully." Taylor's dark eyes were like two coals, afire with determination.

I closed my eyes and thought, hard. No. I fucking wanted this, no matter what it cost. But then a face floated into my mind's eye. "Merry. My relationship with Merry is non-negotiable. I will not do anything that screws up my relationship, no matter what." And then I opened my eyes again to see Taylor smiling at me.

"Good. If you hadn't said that, I would have thought twice about taking you on. Me and Merry go way back. You break her heart; I break your legs. Shall we give it a trial and see what happens?" I don't know why that surprised me, that she and Merry knew one another, in a scene the size of Ludlow Street. But then again, I knew Merry was a better judge of character than me. If Merry trusted someone, that was the best recommendation I knew. Hadn't she been right about Duncan? I told Taylor I'd introduce her to the band, and see how it went.

Doyle didn't care; one manager was as good as another, as far as he was concerned. 

Dieter first tried to sleep with Taylor, acting like he was doing _her_ a favour for even considering her chubby ass. She fixed him with a steely expression. "You tried that once, about five years ago. Do you not remember?" Dieter suddenly recoiled, as if spooked by the ghost of shags past. "Yeah, I didn't think so. I'm wise to your tricks, already, Finkel. Now you behave, and your past doesn't come back to bite you. Capisce?" I had to hand it to her, she did not let anything break her stride, but Dieter, completely knocked back, took on a grudging respect for her. 

She then flew down to Dallas to talk to Dick, to see if he was reading to rejoin the band, or wanted to stay on at rehab or what. Once there, she won his respect by being absolutely no bullshit about what both of them were and weren't prepared to tolerate. Dick, she found out, had been diagnosed with adult ADHD while he was in rehab. That was why he found amphetamine so compulsive; it was the only thing that made him able to focus properly. He was on medication now, and doing much better, but it was absolutely imperative that he did not drink while taking his meds, and also imperative to avoid over-stimulating environments - over-stimulating environments like the Lower East Side party scene. The rest of the band were still a little sore over Dick's desertion, and I might have been a bit suspicious of the sudden diagnosis to be honest, but she talked us all through what he needed, in terms of support, and the kind of environment he needed to prevent a relapse. Because OK, yeah, that's what we all wanted. Dick healthy and clean. So we agreed. Dick would make the move permanent, and have his headquarters in Dallas, but when we needed him in the City, he could stay in the spare room in Taylor's house in Brooklyn, where he could feel like someone was keeping an eye on him. And when Dick reappeared, looking tanned, trim and relaxed, we all breathed a lot easier.

The band agreed unanimously, and Taylor took over. She liaised with Tony, our tour manager, and our booking agents to plot out our world tours for the next two years. She talked to Emma and to Sandra about planning the press campaign, and about a complete website upgrade. She got on the horn to MTV and worked out a deal to get our next video on heavy rotation for two solid months before the album came out. And though Elisha had been stupid enough to let Mandy go, I wormed my way back into her good books and got her on board for _Ugly_. Her high-concept video was filmed for $100,000, an almost impossible sum of money, and featured the band as portrayed by creepy puppets, controlled from above by some mysterious string-puller, who the band all joked was Taylor, but I knew was secretly supposed to be me.

We appeared for only a cameo in our own video, as members of the audience in the back row. As the camera panned across us, it revealed Doyle looking like a sulky schoolboy, his tie deliberately pulled askew; me, with my serious new beard, arms and legs crossed over my immaculate suit, with a binder full of notes on my lap; Dieter in head to toe black, leather and silk mixed together, his trademark haircut now shaved up the back as he smoked like Udo Kier; and Dick, looking relaxed and tan, his trilby tipped forward over his forehead and his newly cropped hair as he pretended to nap. It looked like nothing else on TV, the puppets creepily accurate, like Real Dolls, somehow oddly sexy in their plastic verisimilitude. Dieter wanted to bring them on tour and sit them about the stage like Kraftwerk, but they were only half real and half computer animation, their facial movements mapped from computer scans of our own faces. I was quite sure that the video would have swept the awards, had it not been for Chris Cunningham and that weird Aphex Twin video with the girls in bikinis. Why hadn't _we_ had girls in bikinis? People invariably went apeshit for girls in bikinis. But Taylor told us all, we'd have girls in bikinis over her dead body. OK, Doyle quipped, we can put your dead body in a bikini, and she laughed and pretended to take a swipe at him, but it was cool. That was the kind of partnership we had.

But the best idea of all actually came from my sister, who dropped it casually into a phone conversation. She was still going on about her plan to get accounting to move to an Internet-based platform, when suddenly she mentioned this hip new thing called Napster. People were just casually swapping files all over the internet, ripping CDs to MP3 and sharing them around the world. For a second, I bristled, wondering if people were already stealing my band's first record. But then my mind leapt to the next conclusion: it sounded almost exactly like home taping. How many records had Doyle and I each bought a copy of as teenagers, then swapped tapes, and suddenly there were twice as many fans from every purchase? Many of those beloved, warped, worn-out tapes had eventually been upgraded to vinyl or CD once I had fallen in love. If people could share the tracks they loved with their friends... and those friends were all around the world... Christ, it was better than being on the radio in a hundred countries at once!

I immediately rang Taylor as soon as I got off the phone with Pris. "This new thing called Napster..." I ventured.

"Uh-oh, I think I know where this is going..." Taylor hedged. "I know there are a lot of artists that are against it, and I've heard rumours that Metallica are planning to sue the fans that have been using it, but really, I don't think it's that big of a concern to you guys..."

"Sue our fans?" I said, blinking. "Sue the people who wait out in the rain to get front row spots for our concerts, sue the people who pester all their friends until they buy our records, too, sue the people who are so excited about our music that they would chase it down on the internet just to hear a crappy MP3 a few weeks early? Are you fucking crazy? I don't want to sue them, I want to give each and every one of them a gift and say thank you."

"Oh." Taylor sounded surprised. "Well, if you don't want to go after Napster, what are you asking about them for?"

"How do we get _on_ it? How do we get our new single on there?"

Taylor rounded up Sandra and the Web-girls, who enlisted most of the MetropoList mailing list for the plan. All of them spent a day on the internet, setting up fake accounts and seeding versions of the next Metropolis single all across Napster and the other peer to peer file-sharing networks. Downloaders would be a rewarded with a minute or two of audio, just enough to get them hooked, get them humming the chorus, but they'd have to buy the record to get the compete version. It was genius. Evil, but genius.

We pushed the MP3 clips everywhere - we even got MTV to host a clip of our single, streaming on their website. It was a coup, and a world premier. Gerry fussed as the play count racked up, wondering if it was just giving away music for free, but I kept insisting it was just like free radio play.

After consulting with Emma and Sandra, we decided to do our press days in New York. There was a lot of interest, Sandra told me, and especially on the American side. It wasn't just the NME and Melody Maker that were curious to get the scoop on the new Metropolis album - big players like Rolling Stone and Spin and Billboard had been asking about us. Billboard fucking Magazine, I mean, my teenage bible, my betting sheet and my "village cricket match" all rolled into one. Billboard wanted to interview _us_ about the state of indie-rock at the turn of the Millennium. Holy hot fucking shit.

A lot of the magazines wanted to line up photo shoots, too. I mean, Metropolis had never been shy about photo shoots, even back in the days when my sister had set them up behind Vogue's back. With a decent budget at our disposal, we had booked another of my sister's fashion world recommendations to do a promotional shoot for us at a plush hotel in Midtown, the four of us looking stylish as we lounged in the Philippe Starck lobby. I'd always hated those boring "band posing against a brick wall" type photos that I'd seen so many of when going through demo tapes back at Windlass, so we made a real effort to choose beautiful locations for a backdrop, as well as beautiful clothes to wear.

But then Rolling Stone or Music Maker would turn up, with one of their staff photographers - and really, some of their "staff photographers" were name brand stars in their own right - who would come up with some madcap high concept idea. We did one night-time shoot, up on a roof near Union Square, with the lights of the city behind us, which was one of my favourite photos of us, ever, the four of us looking brash and bold and confident against the view (though really, all I could remember of the shoot was feeling petrified with vertigo and stiff with cold).

We had always done our interviews altogether, in a lump, the four of us, like a gang, but Taylor had the bright idea of splitting us up, so we could cover twice as many interviews in the same allotted time. Dieter was the one that everyone asked to interview, garrulous Dieter with his oversized opinions, guaranteed to provoke column inches. But Taylor had the bright idea of matching Dieter with the more down to earth Dick. I mean, was that really a good idea, I asked her, getting Dick, fresh out of rehab, to babysit Dieter? That was the whole idea, she told me. Dick was one of those guys who really felt better about himself when he had responsibilities, giving him someone to look after would keep him out of trouble.

And so Doyle and I went off to do the other half of the interviews. Doyle, however, absolutely hated talking to the press. I don't know if it was the tape recorder that bothered him, or the way those assholes would lead right off the bat with some stupid, annoying question like "So, I heard you guys are really into Dead Letters" but Doyle, never particularly effusive, would become positively taciturn as soon as he heard the click of a dictaphone, leaving me to pick up the slack. And I sucked at interviews, I never had the faintest clue what to say, wishing that Dieter would swoop in and start banging on about Foucault or whatever mad shit he wanted to impress the journalist with.

Panicking, I rang my sister before the start of the next press day. My sister, who had been writing for magazines and interviewing starlets since I'd been in high school, she had to have some idea about how two fairly shy and introverted guys could talk to the press without coming across like total idiots. So my sister took me and Doyle out to Tea and Sympathy and sat us down and taught us how to _do press_. Well, at least, she taught me, as I did my best to listen and take notes, while Doyle stared at my sister's tits, then flirted with the waitress who freshened up our pot of tea.

"Danny, you've grown a beard!" Pricilla exclaimed when she saw me, reaching out to touch it gently.

I waved her hand away affectionately. "Do you not like it?"

"You look like Grandpa," she said, before adding quickly "Grandpa Davies." As children, we had both slightly feared and absolutely adored our Mother's father in Hampstead.

"Maybe I should get a tweed jacket, start smoking a pipe and writing grumpy editorials for the Guardian," I laughed, stroking my beard thoughtfully. It was always softer than I expected, once it got past the scruffy stubble stage. "Come on, stop fucking with my facial hair and tell us how to deal with interviews without coming off like total losers."

"Right, OK. What you need to do is decide in advance," Pris instructed us, "What it is that you want to get across. Before you even go into the interview, you should have prepared a number of statements about what you're trying to do - promote your record - and rehearse saying them until they just roll out naturally."

"Like learning our lines," Doyle quipped, as I scribbed furiously in my notebook, trying to take all this down. "We're gonna end up gussied up and turned out and manufactured as Pris's little actresses and starlets."

"You can learn a lot from actresses and starlets," Pris retorted. "Deflecting questions gracefully. That's a super important lesson. If someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, have a number of stock responses. 'That's a very good question' is a great thing to say, like you acknowledge the question, and compliment their interview skills, but then bring up something else and just don't answer what they asked. Repeat one of your stock responses instead. If they push, about something you really don't want to talk about, turn it back on them. 'That's a very personal question, can we talk about the record instead' is a good response to that."

"Yeah, I am not good with personal questions," I conceded. "Merry is really good at just not answering them in a way that seems really charming, but I just stutter and turn red. It's not good."

"Danny, you are actually really adorable when you stutter and blush, so just stay quiet, and let them feel sympathy for you. Remember, a good journalist will totally be trying to play you emotionally to get a story, so don't feel bad doing it right back at them."

"Are you gonna sibling out here, should I take off so you two can have a Hallmark Moment?" Doyle quipped, as I, indeed, turned red and started to blush at my sister's compliment.

"You guys are probably already hip to the awkward silence thing, right?" my sister persisted, ignoring Doyle. "Like, all interviewers will use that trick. Leave a really long gap between one question and the next, in the hopes that your subject will get nervous and rush in to fill up the gap, and say something when their guard is dropped. Don't. Say one of your prepared statements, then just smile quietly at them until they ask the next question. It's their job to keep the conversation going if it lags, not yours."

"That one is so hard," I admitted. "Like, I know Doyle is really good at just going silent if he doesn't want to talk about something, but that makes me feel bad, like I feel like I have to try even harder to keep up the conversation."

"It's not a normal conversation," my sister insisted, lowering her chin and levelling her gaze at me, so I knew she was serious. "It's really important to remember that. You are there to do a job, and that job is to promote yourself and promote your record. So always think of some way of bringing it back to the product."

"We are the fucking product," Doyle grumbled.

"So _sell_ yourself," Pricilla snapped back, her eyes flashing. And believe it or not, Doyle actually backed down, like holy shit, my sister must have been awesome as an interviewer if she could handle Doyle's bullshit so easily, and I suddenly felt a stab of remorse that she'd given it up so that I could take a chance at being a musician. But that just made me feel like I really owed it to her, to make the best damned success of _Semantics_ that I could.

I tried my hardest to take Pris's lessons to heart. I actually went home and took out my notebook and wrote down half a dozen things that I wanted to get across about Semantics. It was way harder than it seemed, like, I'd been living with this record for months now, but when asked to put pen to paper and promote it, I could not think of a thing to say about it.

-Semantics is a fucking brilliant record

I looked at that, then shook my head and crossed it out. 

-Semantics is ~~a fucking brilliant~~ an important fucking record.

No, that wouldn't do either. Why? Why was Semantics such an important record? Christ, this was hard. Was this why music journalists were such pretentious jerks all the time? Writing about our music without sounding like a fucking dork, this was harder than the proverbial dancing about architecture. I wrote down something about _Semantics_ being a vast stylistic improvement on _Lights! Camera! Action!_ because the band had grown so much over 18 months of touring. I wrote down something about the rhythmic complexity of writing songs with Dick. Then I wrote down something else about the production tricks I'd learned from Barry Michaels up at Catskills Mansions, and how we'd tried to marry the raw, DIY aesthetics of an indie-rock band with the dense, layered, slick production techniques of modern pop. I wrote about the unexpected discovery that we all loved dub, and the late-night listening sessions we'd bonded over, though maybe I should leave out the chemical enhancement. I wrote about Doyle drawing lyrical inspiration from the uglier, twisted sides of life, from the drug addictions that various band members had suffered and the heartbreaks we'd faced over the past year, losing Merry, losing Auntie Beast...

Wait, no, I couldn't say that. Scratch that, because there was no way I was bringing up any of that shit in an interview. And not just because Merry and I were not supposed to talk about our relationship in the press. I crossed those lines out, and then scribbled through them until they were illegible. What else could I say that didn't paint my bandmates as drug addicts? OK, Doyle was drawing lyrical inspiration from... well, Doyle could talk about Baudelaire or David Foster Wallace or whoever he was into at that point, we'd work that out later.

Our influences. Yeah, that was always tricky, and it was better to get your own in before they tried to pin something on you. I could talk about the Dub thing and talk about how Dick had been playing all those mixes in the studio. And me, I was drawing a lot of inspiration from the weird German records that Merry had been playing me, Neu! and Amon Duul and Harmonia, yeah, that sounded good, but I couldn't say Merry, I had to say My Girlfriend or something like that. No - My Partner, that sounded more grown up. My partner has been turning me on to a lot of Krautrock. While Dieter - Dieter had been listening to a lot of 80s new wave, AbSynth and Tubeway Army and Kraftwerk. Autobahn was a big favourite on the tourbus. In fact, the new album had a ton of synth and eBow on it, and we'd hired a new keyboard player to duplicate the sound live. The live show - oh my god, wait until people heard the live show, with Duncan bringing this new, sophisticated textural layer of keyboards to our raw guitar-based sound. That sounded OK, didn't it? Yes, I could do this. I could promote myself, this wasn't so hard.

I turned up to the interview the next day, sat down next to Doyle, a cup of tea appearing magically at my knee, and smiled at the interviewer, feeling confident and ready to begin.

"So..." the interviewer lead with. "How did you guys all meet one another?"

Doyle rolled his eyes and covered his mouth with his hand, but I took a deep breath and began, explaining for about the ten millionth time, how Doyle and I had gone to the same high school, and I'd met Dieter at art school, and Dick had been a fortuitous introduction from someone at work. It was OK, it was fine to start with the basics.

"And where did the band's name come from?" he asked next.

I could feel Doyle tense beside me on the sofa. "Isn't all of this information on the website somewhere?" he started to growl, but I stilled him with a hand gesture. Actually, I found something oddly meditative about answering these same questions over and over, like there was something therapeutic about retelling your origin stories again and again.

"We were named after a Kraftwerk song we used to do a cover of. You know, Kraftwerk have been a big influence on us, on the latest record. We've been experimenting with synths and electronic sounds in our new material; we've even brought along a keyboard player on our last few tours to help duplicate our more New Wave direction on the new album."

"So I hear you guys are big Dead Letters fans." I tensed, but my smile did not fade from my face. "What's your favourite Dead Letters album?"

"That's a very good question," I said smoothly, like I hadn't practised this one at home a dozen times. "You know recently, I had the privilege of talking with Dead Letters' producer, Barry Michaels, and watching him while he worked. He taught me so much about the use of compressors in pop music, and I got to put that knowledge to use during the recording of our latest album. Our new album, _Semantics_ , which is out on Musketeer Records on the 11th of November this year..."

Behind his hand, Doyle made a weird snorting sound that might have been suppressed laughter.

Not all interviews were that bad, though. Once you started talking to people from Spin and Alternative Press and Music Maker, they had actually done their research. Music Maker, however, that was a bit disappointing, because we'd grown up thinking of it as a veritable muso bible, prepared to do serious coverage of us as musicians, asking us about our amplifiers and guitar string gauges, but all they wanted was the gossip about groupies and blow. Dieter, apparently, had talked the guy's ear off for over an hour about our 'epic debauchery', claiming that musicians had a bounden duty to express and perform the 'Dionysian' yearnings of their audience, both on and offstage.

"Well, I don't know about that," I hedged, shooting a glance over at Doyle, who squirmed and went silent. Wasn't Dick supposed to put the brakes on Dieter mouthing off about that shit? "That's not really my scene. I mean, if you're going to talk about the Nietzschian dichotomy of culture, I have always been far more drawn to the Apollonian end of art. But maybe that's why we work so well together, as a band. It's all about balance. Dieter represents the forces of chaos and emotion and dissonance, while I've always been more about reason and logic and harmony."

"Reason and logic?" Doyle chuckled slightly, turning to smirk at me.

"What?" I protested, raising my hands, palm up.

"And you wonder why our band has the reputation we do; this interviewer here clearly wants to talk about the decadent aspects of the rock'n'roll lifestyle, and you start banging on about obscure 19th Century German philosophy," he teased.

"I'm just not into the decadent aspects of the rock'n'roll lifestyle," I insisted. "At this point, I think I am the only member of this band who is in a serious, long-term relationship. You and Dieter, your ideas of decadence hold little appeal to me." Crossing my arms across my chest, I leaned back into the sofa, glaring at him, as we lapsed into silence.

"With four such disparate personalities in the group, how do you hold it together?" the gentleman from Music Maker finally asked, when it was clear we would scrap over this no more.

"We're a democracy," I explained.

"Ha!" snorted Doyle.

"We are, I mean, we vote on everything. We have to, the four of us have too strong personalities for any one of us to dominate."

"Yeah, it's a democracy - we're like the UN, but he's the United States," drawled Doyle. "We've all got votes, but he's the one holding the nuclear weapons."

Had it not been for my sister's thorough lectures the previous day, I might have leapt to Doyle's bait, and started an argument right there in front of the journalist, saying, well, if I had the nuclear weapons it was because I was the only one willing to work hard enough to keep in touch with record companies and managers and press agents, but instead I picked up my cup of tea and took a long sip, savouring it carefully. The journalist said nothing, clearly hoping that one of us would plunge into the silence and spill the beans on the deep rifts within Metropolis, but again, thanks to my sister, we were ready for that technique and kept our mouths shut.

"So who writes the songs?"

"We all do," I said, at the exact moment that Doyle quite distinctly and loudly said "Daniel." Then both of us laughed, exchanging glances slightly awkwardly.

"Well, I come up with the riffs first," I confessed. "But when I take them to Doyle to write lyrics, or present them to the rest of the band, they completely change them and even rearrange them in ways I hadn't anticipated. It's not all about me, you see."

"It is _all_ about Daniel," Doyle echoed beside me, pretending to cup his mouth so I couldn't hear. I just smiled, tight-lipped, and rolled my eyes.

"What does it feel like, to write a song?"

That question just hit me, full-force in the chest, like I totally wasn't expecting it. What did it feel like, to write a song? That was a question I'd been trying to answer since I was 17 years old, and still couldn't quite do it.

"That's a very good question," Doyle said in a kind of sing-song, please-the-teacher voice, like, actually the bastard had been paying attention to every word my sister had said, he just didn't want to give her the flattery of showing it.

But I put my hand on his forearm. "No, really, I want to answer that. It's just something I need to think about for a sec..."

"It's an impossible question," Doyle sighed. "It's like asking... what does it feel like to make love."

"Like a surrender," I blurted out, without fully thinking it through. "Like a beautiful swoon. Like, you allow yourself to fall, and trust that your partner will be there to catch you. It's only so beautiful because you allow yourself to be vulnerable for that moment."

"Are you talking about making love, or writing music now?" asked the man from Music Maker.

"Well, both," I stuttered, scratching my beard compulsively, feeling like this was something important. "Because making music, it really feels like giving yourself over to something bigger than yourself. In the first place, just writing the song, like it is never a conscious decision to sit down and write a hit. You open yourself up, and accept what comes through. Maybe it's a number one record, maybe it's a shitty coffee jingle, you have no way of knowing, you just have to give yourself over to it. Surrender your ego and let the music take you where it's gonna go. And again, when I take a song to the band - like, this group of individuals I've assembled to make music with. It's an act of faith, every time we sit down to play a song for the first time. That I trust these guys are gonna take my little riff, and make it amazing, because I am in a band with three actual geniuses. And I guess, they trust me not to bring them shit riffs."

"You don't think of us as geniuses," Doyle mumbled.

"I do actually," I insisted. 

"You don't treat us like geniuses."

"I do, you know. But that same thing that makes it amazing, is also what makes it so difficult. Balancing four kinds of genius, it's hard as hell. Like, I know that Music Maker are gonna talk to my bandmates, and they are all going to paint me as some little nazi control freak, because yeah, I talk to the record company, and I hire the managers and I fire the guys who aren't working out..."

"Yeah, I know, I did actually talk to Darin for the piece," Music Maker bloke offered.

"And he said I was a total control freak nazi, right?" I put my hand to my head, feeling like my sister's advice had all been for nothing, that the interview was getting away from me.

"He said that you were hugely ambitious. That you knew what you wanted to do with the band right from the start, and you were dead serious about it, when everyone else was just mucking about, playing at being hipsters in the East Village."

I sat back, blinking, astonished that Darin of all people had actually said something halfway nice about me. Though, really, knowing Darin, he had meant it as an insult. I could remember the old Ludlow Street indie scene, where saying someone was _ambitious_ was like calling them a yuppie-ass sell-out. But you know what? Fuck that shit. That was why they were still mucking about on Ludlow Street, and we were being interviewed by Music Maker.

"Dan, old man, you're absolutely right," said Doyle, patting me firmly on the shoulder in a fraternal kind of way. "That is both the frustrating thing, and the amazing thing about this band, that every member of this band is a genius in some way. And I don't use that word lightly. You know - even Dieter, for all his pretentiousness."

"Dieter is actually a much smarter guy than anyone ever gives him credit for," I jumped in, amazed to find that I was defending the guy.

"Dieter is the kind of guy who is never _able_ to let you forget how fucking smart he is. He's the kind of guy that just has to smack you around the face with his intellect, just to prove he can. Like, there are totally times in this band when I really wish everyone was _less_ fucking smart."

I stared at Doyle because honestly, this was not the sort of thing we should be discussing in front of a journalist from Music Maker magazine, in fact, my sister would be throwing a fit if she heard us talking shit about one another so casually like this. But I also wanted to push him, to ask him, 'is that what the fucking about with smack is really about, trying to dumb yourself down - because _you_ are so much fucking smarter than that.' But I didn't dare, with Music Maker sitting right there, making notes in his little stenographer's pad, even as the dictaphone hummed on.

Doyle pushed on. "Because being in a band with four geniuses means that you always have to justify every aesthetic decision you want make in our music - which can be both frustrating and infuriating - but the end result is that every aesthetic choice is _genius_." He let out a mighty sigh at the end of this speech, blowing his hair out of his face like he was exhausted after this pronouncement, as I stared at him, gobsmacked. But then he turned towards me, his face almost inexpressibly sad and kinda tired, and added, "Sometimes all that genius can be fucking exhausting. You just want a long rest from all that genius."

When the man from Music Maker was gone, I turned to Doyle and put my hand tentatively on his arm. "Doyle, are you alright, man?"

Doyle got a strange, lost expression in his face, as if that were a question he had to think about. "I guess?" he finally shrugged, which was weird. I was used to Doyle wisecracking his way through everything.

"You guess," I repeated, sipping my tea, though it was now cold.

"Putting out a new record is such a weird feeling. It's like sitting on top of a massive rocket, just before the countdown starts. And you have no way of knowing, is this thing going to blast you off into the stars, or is it just going to blow up on your ass."

"I kinda like that feeling," I confessed with a grin. "It's exciting. Like sitting at the top of a roller coaster, knowing no matter what happens, you're in for a hell of a ride."

"I guess that's the difference between you and me," Doyle sighed. "I always knew you were ambitious as hell. That you weren't getting off the rocket until just one second before it exploded. But me, I'm scared I'm gonna go down with the ship."

I pulled back slightly. That word again. _Ambitious_. Why was everyone around me so down on ambition? I mean, I'd already achieved all of my dreams, right? So why did I keep pushing? Well, I knew the answer to that, even if I didn't want to admit it to Doyle. Merry. I wanted to be successful than my girlfriend.

"Look, I got everything I always dreamed of out of this band the day that we signed to Musketeer. Everything else, you know, this is all gravy. It's just like... It's not even ambition at this point, so much as it's a kind of curiosity, like how far can we really take this thing. Y'know, how far can this thing really go?" I smiled what Merry always called my 'cat that got the canary' smile. She knew I wasn't telling the whole truth when I smiled that smile.

Doyle shook his head and rolled his eyes, gnawing at fingernails that were already bitten down to the quick. "You're a terrible liar, Dan. But, y'know... I don't know that I signed up to be a spaceman."

"Come on, Doyle. Aren't you just a little bit excited? You want to ride this rocket as much as I do."

The look Doyle shot me was one of pure terror. "I never had much of a head for heights."


	31. Growing The Beard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Metropolis release their sophomore album, _Semantics_ , and the fanfare and unanticipated levels of success propel Daniel and Merry to the levels of ~Celebrity Super-Couple~. Merry may be an old hand at this 'meeting your idols' thing, but Daniel? Well, Daniel is finding a little bit weird, to be honest.
> 
> But as Metropolis begin their slippery ascendancy to mainstream chart success, Deltawave - and Merry - are beset by a series of misfortune and bad luck.

Semantics' record release was set for mid November, early enough that the press's advance copies still stood a good chance of getting in end of year lists from Pazz and Jop to the NME's End of Year run-down to the Festive 50, but close enough to Christmas to get an uplift in gift sales. The day of the release, we would be doing a signing at the Tower Records on 4th Street, then we were doing a triumphant headlining gig at Irving Plaza that evening, as an official start to the tour. It sold out within 20 minutes, so Taylor booked the real party for the following night, in a tiny, hidden speakeasy of a private bar in the West Village. It felt like a bit of a betrayal, not doing it at the Lacuna, but Charlene said there was no way she could have kept it private. People knew us too well, associated us too heavily with the Lacuna. It had the potential to get too messy.

Merry was Peter Book-ing it back home specially for the release, though it meant she was skipping out on a week of promotion in LA. Elisha was delighted by the news, as it meant more attention for him, but Michael was furious. But as dissent grew in the ranks of Deltawave, Merry had decided she no longer feared Michael. That week, not only was I unveiling the new, more muscular Metropolis, but Merry and I were going public with our relationship, whether Michael liked it or not.

I had wanted to pick Merry up at the airport, but I was too busy, so I had to send a car. The day was a madhouse. Morning at the Musketeer offices doing radio interviews, then over to Tower to talk to security and go through the set up the signing. Up a dozen blocks to soundcheck at Irving Plaza, then back down to Tower for the signing... and holy shit, look at all those people lined up around the block. Were all those people for us? Dick and I exchanged shocked expressions, while Dieter lounged in the back of the limo, black sunglasses wrapped around his face, pretending like he did this every day.

It was chaos. Tower ended up having to empty out the store of regular customers, there were so many people. As the line filed through, I sat with my band, smiling and making friendly conversation as I signed, but I could not see the end of the line. My hand was starting to ache, and I couldn't believe that I had to play a gig on top of it, that night, but I continued to shake hands and nod and pose for photos with smitten girls. More people came through. This was getting absurd. Tower had expected a few hundred people; there were nearly a thousand. I kept glancing at my watch, getting antsy about the timing, but the fans kept coming. Some girl kissed me, blurting out "I love you Daniel!" and smearing my serious beard with lipstick before being dragged off me by security. Surprised by the declaration, I replied that I loved her, too, and signed an CD with an extra X for her. This was the kind of thing that happened to Dieter all the time, but it was a shock to me. I wasn't entirely sure I liked it.

The time we had been scheduled to leave came and went, but the line kept coming. The shop ran out of CDs at one point, and the management had to go in the back and get more boxes. It was OK, Taylor told me. Most of the kids in the queue seemed to be going on to Irving Plaza as well, so they would willingly wait for the show. Eventually, the queue started to thin a bit, becoming patchy as the last stragglers bought their CDs, then finally there was only one customer left, and the security staff were locking up so no more kids could get in. Anxious to be going, I craned my neck so I could see the last customer taking forever at the counter, signing something - a receipt? No, wait. As the woman walked down the long chute towards the signing counter, I saw her shape resolve into the grinning face of Merry, looking totally incongruous, a silver leather jacket thrown over the top of a floor length white ballgown.

"I've been waiting over an hour up at Irving Plaza! Got sick of waiting for you, so I figured I'd walk down and get a CD signed. Guy on the till made me sign a Deltawave CD instead. So here, sign my damn CD!"

Laughing, I bent over the counter to kiss her, as Doyle took her CD and started scribbling on it. He wrote 'Merry Merry quite contrary how does your garden grow' while Dieter drew a picture of a giant spurting cock with his hairdo saying 'see what you're missing' and Dick wrote 'please come back. dan is a monster when u r not around' before passing it to me to write 'I love you so so so so sooooo so much but seriously can we get in the damn cab to Irving Plaza now? yr boy-thing x'

Photos. People took photos at the stage door as we arrived. And not just usual fans hanging about, begging for autographs as we ducked inside, but actual paparazzi type photographers. Merry and I hung back for a moment, nestling together in the flashbulb glow, trying to present a strong image of a couple, though she towered over me in her silver stilettos. Yes. Fuck Michael the Manager, this was a thing. Daniel J Asheton Jr and Merry Wythenshawe were an official item. "Fiancee?" shouted one of the paparazzi, noticing the hippie-ring Merry now habitually wore on the third finger on her left hand. " _Partner_ ," Merry shouted back, quite decisively, and kissed me for the cameras. Put that in your gossip columns and smoke it. (I was really gratified when those photos turned up in the New York Post the next day, even if they misspelled my name, and pleased as punch when they were in the NME the week after that.)

We were nearly an hour late going onstage, for which I felt eminently apologetic, and wanted to say something, but Doyle had always insisted that we keep talking to a minimum onstage. He hated chatty bands; he always said it destroyed the illusion. But the audience, instead of being angry, appeared slavishly devoted, whipped up into a frenzy by the wait. Irving Plaza was huge. I had forgotten quite how big it was until the lights swept back across the audience and I looked out to see people filling the bottom floor all the way back, and rows and rows of faces lining the balcony upstairs. The energy in the room, as we started playing _Ugly_ , our new single, and the crowd surged forwards, was the first sign that things were going to be on another scale with this record. Someone collapsed at the front and had to be pulled out, so at the end of the song, I stopped the band and asked everybody in the hall to take a step back, because girls were getting crushed up front. But people wouldn't move, and someone screamed out "I love you Dieter!" Dieter said nothing, he just smirked behind his black shades and turned his back on his adoring fans, staring at Dick.

"We're very glad that you love us, we all love you, too. But please, for the sake of your friends, could you take a step back?" I asked. Finally, the crowd moved, but another young woman had to be pulled out of the front row.

There were too many people. It didn't feel like a gig any more, I couldn't really see individuals. All I saw was a huge, massive, scary blob of arms and heads and waving hands fading off out of sight. But the music, the music still lifted me up and bore me off on a wave of adrenaline as I threw myself into it, running to the back of the stage and catching Dick's eye as I leapt up onto the drum riser for that strutting bassline that underpinned _Bee-Sting_. Dick grinned back at me then counted Dieter off as the noise of the crowd crashed over us like a wave. I mean, this was better than any drug, wasn't it?

We played our full set, then got dragged back for two encores. I just could not believe the love coming off the room, like they did not want to let us go, let alone go home. Even as I toasted the audience with my drink after the second encore, then walked offstage, towelling my face, I could hear them clapping and stamping, all in time, faster and faster until the whole audience just sounded like a speeding train.

The afterparty backstage was a madhouse, filled to bursting with scenesters and hipsters, some people that I actually knew from playing gigs with them once upon a time, and others that I knew only as faces in the NME. I found Merry, who pressed a drink into my hand and kissed me, and I clung to her. It wasn't just the musicians, I could mostly handle the musicians, with a handshake and a few minutes' shop talk. But there were actual _famous_ people, film stars and literary people, crowding the aftershow. Doyle was chatting up some actress I recognised off the television, while Dieter was deep in conversation with... holy shit was that really Bret Easton Ellis in the rumpled Armani suit? I blinked and both of them disappeared, so maybe I just imagined that.

The crowd parted for a moment, one of those weird New York moments where a ripple went through the room, and suddenly I was aware of Doyle by my elbow, staring hard. I followed his gaze, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach. On the other side of the room, was Matthew from Dead Letters, which would have been nerve-wracking enough in and of itself, but it was the girl he was with that Doyle was staring at, a woman so dazzlingly beautiful that I would have stared anyway, even if I hadn't recognised her from literally _hundreds_ of magazine covers.. Oh, shit, they were coming our way, the singer from the band I had grown up worshipping, and the woman that People Magazine had recently crowned Sexiest Woman In The World, for the fourth year in a row. What the hell were they doing at our aftershow? Oh, right. Merry had told me before; Matthew and Cindy went way back. (I did my best not to think of Merry's other connection to Dead Letters, relieved it was only Matthew and not Pete.)

But Merry let out a little cry of surprise and walked over to the woman, greeting her warmly as they exchanged air kisses on the cheek. "Karen! Oh, and Mattie as well, what a treat!" Another set of air kisses. "How lovely to see you. You look fantastic! Look at your tan, Karen, where have you been?"

"Mustique, darling, Keef leant us his villa. You must come some time, the weather is so lovely this time of year..." A photographer appeared and snapped a photo of the pair of them, as Matthew and Doyle stared at one another as if sizing each other up. I mean, yeah, Doyle and I had both loved Dead Letters since we were teenagers, but there had been so much fracas in the press, with people accusing us of blatantly ripping them off, that a slight animosity glowed in Doyle's eyes. Matthew's face, however, was so unperturbed as to be completely inscrutable.

"Have you met my partner, Danny? Daniel Asheton of Metropolis," Merry chirped, taking me by the elbow and pulling me over, and suddenly I found myself in the fierce spotlight glow of the amazingly beautiful woman's gaze. I was about to extend my hand when I felt myself pulled into air-kisses that left me feeling quite dizzy. I didn't even need to be told her name. Karen Litchen. She was only the most famous supermodel in the world, and though I thought I was used to beautiful women, I felt my knees go distinctly wobbly.

"So how do you two know each other?" I found myself stuttering, looking back and forth between my own personal goddess, whose beauty I was somewhat accustomed to, and this new but oddly familiar goddess. I mean, Karen was scary, but the alternative - talking to Matthew from Dead Letters - that was fucking terrifying. How was this even my life? For an awful moment, I felt like my teenage self, hiding behind a guitar so I wouldn't have to talk to the terrifyingly attractive girls at the Dalton School tea dance.

"Firbank, of course," said Karen, tossing her glossy, tawny-blonde locks, looking vaguely irritated that this was even a topic of discussion.

Oh Jesus Christ, of course, I mean, she had only been famous as the face of Firbank for the first half of the 90s. "We have the same agent," Merry supplied quietly, with a cute half-grin as the photographer reappeared, and this time I managed a deer in the headlights expression of blank terror, sandwiched between these two blonde giantesses for the pages of the Daily News. A few feet away, the look of outrage on Doyle's face seemed frozen by the flash for a terrible instant.

"Oh," I said without thinking, still blinking against the photographer's flash. "You must know my sister, then. My sister, Pricilla? Pris worked at Vogue for years."

And with that, Karen's haughty patrician face suddenly softened and changed. "Pris? _You're_ Pris Asheton's little brother? Oh god, I've known Pris for years - Vogue gave me my first cover, you know - how is she?" And suddenly she stopped being this terrifying creature that was a celebrity, and just became one of my sister's fashiony friends, as I caught her up on my sister's new career, and the new boyfriend she seemed quite serious about. Hey, look at me, this _famous_ thing is easy, making small talk with supermodels, asking vague questions about the sort of things my sister and her mates used to chat about - exciting locations they'd recently done shoots at, which designers were decent people to work for - until she actually appeared to be sort-of enjoying the conversation.

As we chatted desultorily, Matthew seemed to relax slightly, though his face remained impassive as granite - I mean, god forbid someone as imposingly famous as Matthew from Dead Letters should ever deign to smile. But after what felt like an hour, but was probably only about ten or fifteen minutes, he moved into a lull in the conversation like shark manoeuvring in for the kill.

"Metropolis," he finally drawled, his famously husky voice drawing the last S into a sibilant hiss. "So I heard your new album last week."

I didn't even want to know how Matthew had got hold of a copy, a week before it was even due in the shops. "Oh yeah?" I managed to stutter. The only way I'd been getting through the whole conversation was by pretending that he wasn't there. "So what did you think?" I risked a laugh, but my voice was so nervous it came out like an odd little shriek. "Are we still just embarrassing Dead Letters copyists?"

Matthew frowned, though I couldn't tell if it was just concentration or actual displeasure. "You guys don't sound anything like Dead Letters."

"Yeah, I don't think so either, but you know." I shrugged lightly. "You know... the press."

He leaned forward and clasped a paternal hand on my shoulder. "Asheton, let me give you a little piece of advice, if you want to survive having a career as long as ours. Do not read your press. Just weigh it."

I laughed again nervously. "Yes, sir."

The clasp tightened, became almost a hug before he let go. "The new album is good. Very good. A real progression," he said, quite low, as if he didn't want anyone to overhear. "People will try to keep you the same forever, but don't ever be afraid to progress. The day you stop growing is the day you start dying."

"Thank you, sir," I managed to stutter, feeling completely overwhelmed. Matthew from Dead Letters liked my new album. I felt like all the air had been drained out of the room. "I'll remember that forever, sir."

"And kid, don't call me sir." There, finally, the granite face cracked, and a tiny hint of a smile shone through, and I swear to god he winked. But then he and Karen exchanged glances, and some indecipherable murmuring, and the pair of them disappeared off to another, hipper party, but not before Karen repeated her invitation that Merry and I should join her at _Keef's Villa_ on Mustique. Oh yes, of course, agreed Merry, and then another round of air kisses that left me feeling like I was actually floating. Karen Litchen's lipstick on my cheek; I almost didn't want to wipe it away.

"Wow," I said softly as the beautiful people moved across the room, trailing envious glances in their wake.

"What?" asked Merry, then as she saw the dazzled expression on my face, her eyes flashed.

"I'm just not used to this kind of thing, OK?" I confessed, feeling my cheeks flushing. Especially where I'd just been kissed.

"What kind of thing? Matthew? Or Karen?"

_Matthew_. _Karen_. How on earth was I on first name terms with these people? "Matthew was a total head-trip, yes. But Karen... Wow. Karen."

"You totally fancied her, didn't you?" She didn't even sound jealous, she actually just sounded amused, like I was in for a good teasing. But in a weird way, I was glad to just be joking about Karen, because it meant I didn't have to think about the singer from Dead Letters, turning up, at our album release party.

"She's a beautiful woman, alright?"

Merry was laughing aloud, with her hand over her mouth. "Ha ha ha, I have not seen you this flustered since... well, since..."

Now I was blushing seriously. "I have not _felt_ this flustered since you kissed me at the Ice Cream Bar for the first time, if that is what you were about to say."

"You are so adorable when you're flustered," she giggled, pulling a curl out of the hair I had only just perfectly gelled back into place after the gig.

But abruptly Doyle was at my elbow again. "Karen Litchen," he said, with a predatory tone that made me distinctly uncomfortable. "You were talking to Karen Litchen, and you didn't even bother introducing me?"

Suddenly, I was irritated at Doyle, though I couldn't really say why. "I don't know, you could have just asked _Matthew_ for an introduction," I snapped back, then turned to my girlfriend. Snaking my arm around her waist, I pushed my nose into her ear. "Haven't we put in enough of an appearance? Can we just go now?"

Doyle slunk off, his face a stormcloud, and I glared after him, like, for fucks sake, this was our album launch party, what was _that_ about? Our album launch party, where Matthew, from Dead Letters, has just told me that he thought our album was good. Was _very_ good, in fact. It still seemed slightly surreal, like it hadn't really happened at all. But then I realised my girlfriend was nuzzling me, her lips soft against the lobe of my ear. "I'm happy to leave, yes, but I don't want to go home. The loft is a disaster area of packing. Can we go to a hotel instead?"

It seemed so decadent, taking my own girlfriend to a hotel in our own city. But we took a taxi down to the Soho Grand, and Merry put it on her credit card. I was about to protest when Merry paid, but Merry had started paying for a lot of things recently. Somehow we'd acquired a joint bank account from which we paid bills, and the mortgage on the loft, but every time I went to transfer more cash into there, it always seemed to have more money than I remembered.

"Come on, let me get it," I urged, feeling ever so slightly put out, like I wanted to be able to provide for her occasionally.

"No way." Merry laughed as she waved my card away. "Late birthday present because I was off on tour for the real day." She kissed me and giggled as she ordered a bottle of champagne to be waiting, chilling in the room, when we got upstairs. It was perfect. The room was perfect, the night was perfect, the girl in my arms was perfect, everything was perfect. Kicking off her high heels, she picked up the trailing hem of her ballgown to avoid tripping over it, and made her way to the windows, throwing back the curtains to reveal the glittering lights of Manhattan.

"Oh, Danny! Look at the view... do you think we can see our house from here?"

As we sat on the floor in front of the giant picture windows, nestled in the deep pile of the shag carpet, and looked out across the city, I filled with a deep contentment. Cool band, beautiful girlfriend, lucky life. I looked over at her and grinned, feeling oddly like it was our honeymoon.

She gazed over at me from under her eyelashes, then grinned back at me and reached out to gently scratch the hair on my jaw. "So you're keeping the beard, huh?"

Doubt clouded my mind for a moment. "Why? Do you not like it?"

"Oh no, I like it. It's very sexy. It's just... it's funny, in over two years, I don't think I've ever seen you without sideburns or a beard or at least stubble." Smiling, she stroked my scruffy facial hair as if I were a cat.

"If I'm clean-shaven, I get proofed to buy beer. Even at the advanced old age of 27," I  confessed, then suddenly started thinking about that two years thing. Surely it was... yes, it had been much longer than that. "It'll be three years in a few months," I reminded her, trying to remember the first night we'd spent together, back in that tiny cramped studio apartment on Ludlow Street. All I could remember was how afraid I had been of her beauty. I had eventually stopped being afraid of her, but I'd never stopped thinking of her as breathtaking. "Are we going to try to do something for our anniversary this year?"

"Who knows where either of us will be in two months," she shrugged, dropping her hand and touching her fingertips against mine in the long rug. For a moment, she frowned, looking slightly pissed off, but then she raised her eyes and looked at me the same way she had looked at me, that first night, like she couldn't quite believe her luck at pulling the cute guitarist. This felt like our real life again, two ambitious kids from the East Village, just pretending at being rock stars, not the hip celebrity couple who posed with supermodels for photos in the tabloids.

"Well, actually I know exactly..." I dug in my messenger bag for my diary. "In January, I will be doing a week's worth of gigs in Scandinavia, culminating in headlining a Viking-themed snow festival in Norway, brrrr, and you will be playing in Australia, in the heat of summer, lucky you."

She made a face. "I don't want to go to Australia."

"Come on - koalas, kangaroos, crazy batshit marsupials... you'll love it."

Taking my hand in hers, she squeezed it, playing with my boney knuckles. "I don't think we're going to make it."

"What do you mean?" I felt an icy finger penetrate my heart, until I realised she wasn't talking about _us_ , she was talking about her band.

"I don't think that Deltawave are even going to finish the American tour... So I don't want to go to Australia. We don't even have the money to fly home for Christmas, so we'll be stuck out there the whole time."

"Christmas on the beach, I'm sure you'll have a whale of a time."

"I don't want to have Christmas without you," she confessed. "I wanted you to come up and spend Christmas with me and my Mum..." I opened my mouth to complain, but she laid her finger across my lips. "No, it's fine now. When my Mum sees those photos in the NY Post calling you my fiancé, she'll come round to the idea of letting you and me share a bedroom."

I let out a chuckle. "So she's finally come round to the idea that you and I are actually consenting adults?"

"Wouldn't that be great, though? You, me, my Mum, for Christmas..."

"And the dogs," I reminded her.

"You know, I think I would much rather have Charles and Diana snapping round my ankles and growling at one another than spend my Christmas scrapping with Elisha and putting up with his bullshit, because you know what, I swear to god, two fat, cranky, ten-year old Corgis have better personalities and sharper intellectual capabilities than Elisha fucking Diamond..." Her eyes flashed, and I almost laughed, but then she caught herself and stopped, scrambling to her feet. "Shit, I'm sorry. I promised myself I wouldn't talk about this, wouldn't spoil your night. What do you want first, another glass of champagne or a quick blow job?"

I felt my cock twitch at even the thought, and I loved the way her eyes glinted at even the thought of sex with me, but I rose and walked up behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist and resting my chin on her shoulder. " It's OK, we can talk. I don't mind. I know you, you're stronger than that. You can survive this."

"Yeah, but I'm not sure that Elisha can," she sighed. I kept silent, swaying against her gently, touching the soft satin of her dress, feeling how my stiffening cock fit between the lobes of her arse as I held her, waiting for her to say more. "The record isn't selling well. Not horribly... I suppose we will recoup if we can chart a single. But nothing like the last one. And Elisha is taking it badly, like a personal insult. He's fighting with Bebe again, over the next single, because she wants one of my songs, and he wants one of his."

"Christ, this again. Doesn't he ever learn?"

"No, never. This was all settled months ago, in exchange for that stupid fucking name. People hate the name, they don't even understand what it means. Bebe was right. Semantics works for Metropolis' fanbase. Semiotics does not work for Deltawave's."

But my mind wasn't on her band, it was on her breast, which I had cupped in my hand as I rubbed myself against her arse. "I can think of some things that work for both of us."

Merry twisted around in my grasp, to face me, running her hand over my beard as her legs parted so I could slip my whole body between them. "Are you gonna do something with that, or are you just going to tease me all night?"

Clearly, she was trying to change the conversation, so I let her. "Do you have any of those crazy condoms of yours, then?" I asked, burying my face in her neck and nibbling at the lobe of her ear. Christ, just the smell of her turned me on.

"Shit," she swore. "Left them back at the flat." But her hands drifted lower, working their way under my belt to grab my ass. "Do you want to do it anyway?"

"You know if you get pregnant, you have to marry me," I breathed.

"If I get pregnant, I don't have to tour Australia."

"You... I suppose this is just what we do."

"Yup, this is just what we do," she agreed, even as she pulled me backwards and manoeuvred me towards the bed.

Twice, and then again the next morning, I pumped her full of my sperm, half praying that this time she meant it, that this time she would quit her band, and stay with me, but half terrified that I might have to do the same. As we lay together in the king-sized bed, gently kissing one another with post-coital starry-eyes and twining our fingers together, the old, familiar wish swept over me. Why did we live these crazy lives, chasing back and forth across the globe in search of a dream? Why didn't we just drop out, and go live on a farm somewhere, and spend the rest of our lives bringing that soft, soppy smile to each other's faces?

I thought about the gig, about that adrenaline rush, feeling the energy surging off a crowd that big, that excited, that bursting with devotion. I thought about the better-than-sex blast-off of a show like that, the mental high, the ego-inflating surge of hundreds of women reaching for me, screaming my name. And I tried to compare and contrast it with this tender, intimate feeling of lying in bed, staring into the eyes of a woman who knew me better than I knew myself. How on earth was I supposed to choose between two impossibly appealing options?

We checked out late, mid-afternoon, and made our way back up into the Village, to Sixth Street for a nostalgic curry at Milon, amidst all the christmas tree lights, where we'd had our first dinner. I ordered way too much food, and jokingly encouraged her to eat for two. Then I couldn't help myself, I found myself drawn up towards Union Square, curious to visit Musketeer and see if there were any sales figures coming in yet.

"This is nuts," said Gerry, shaking my hand and kissing Merry's cheek as we walked in. "It doesn't make any sense. This thing has only been on sale for two days, and we're already getting reorders. The distributors are asking us if we can repress midweek, to get more CDs in the shops ASAP."

"That's good, isn't it? How quick can you do a turnaround? Within the week?"

"We're going to have to. Otherwise we are just going to run out." Gerry looked up at me, astonished. "In 15 years in the business, Musketeer have never run out of a band's pressing during the first week."

"How many did you press?" I asked, nervously. This was what had happened to Three Square; they just hadn't been able to keep up with the demand.

"Look, at the height of your last sales cycle, when you guys were on heavy rotation on KROQ, you guys were selling about 6000 records a week. We've sold _three times_ that, already, in the first two days it's been on sale."

I whistled as air escaped from between my teeth, even as Merry turned to me and squeezed my hand. "That's fantastic. You guys might have your number one, after all."

Gerry's phone rang, and he tried to wave us away. "Don't you two have a party to go to, or something?"

"No, Gerry, we're going to sit here all afternoon, and watch as your sales receipts come in," I teased, even as Taylor appeared at the door with a print-out of an excel worksheet full of figures.

I barely remembered the private party that evening, drunk off my head on champagne, sitting in comfort in an opulent cigar bar, with my stunning girlfriend perched on my lap and beautiful people swelling all around me, everybody kissing my ass and telling me how great I was, how great my band was, how great I looked with my serious beard.

But, to my surprise and dismay, the bouncer we'd hired to keep out undesirables checked his list and actually let PCPete in. What the fuck? I'd specifically removed his name from Dieter's list, how on earth had the bastard snuck back on? He smiled at me unctuously from across the room, and waved jauntily, like the bastard couldn't even show me the respect of resenting me for sacking him, then immediately went over to congratulate Duncan, shaking his hand. Duncan just looked confused, and slightly suspicious, eyeing him through the long brown forelock that was already starting to grow back way past regulation Metropolis hair length, then shrugged him off as Dieter approached.

Watching the whole exchange, Dick sat opposite us, crammed into a bucket seat by himself, hanging onto a glass of tonic water for dear life, his knuckles going white on the upholstery as Dieter and PCPete started chopping out lines of coke on the bar behind us. I guess Dieter had decided that the "no drugs around Dick" prohibition didn't apply to him; the rules never seemed to apply to Dieter. And besides, by Dieter's logic, coke wasn't even hard drugs, not _really_. Dick, who had been doing so well up until that point, looked like he was on the point of crumbling.

But abruptly, Merry disappeared from my lap. When I looked around for her, she'd gone over and pulled up a chair to sit with Dick, taking his hand and stroking it gently, asking if he was OK. She smiled and pointed to his tonic water, saying she was on soft drinks, too, with a gentle wink and a glance at her belly, and the relieved look he gave her, it nearly broke my heart. I could hear her working her charm on Dick, pulling him into a conversation about Texas, and asking him what was Dallas like, was it really hot there, did he know this lovely theatre in Deep Ellum that Deltawave had played the last time they'd been through town, and had he ever been to Marfa to look at the UFOs? And slowly Dick relaxed and started to chat, and even smiled, taking off his hat and gesturing with it as he explained the atmospheric conditions that produced the strange floating lights. And I smiled to see them, just thinking the whole time, oh my god, Merry is such a pearl of a girl, such a complete fucking pearl, what an amazing mother she is going to be.

 

We were on tour in DC when the results of the first week's sales came in from Gerry via email. Over 62,500 units shifted. I stared at that figure and felt my heart start to beat in my throat. Trying to work out the net profit per unit, and then our half of the split... Christ, it didn't bear thinking about. Another email came in from Taylor a few moments later. Number 15 on the US album chart. Not even the alternative chart. Number 15 on the mainstream Billboard Hot 200. Number 22 on the UK album chart, 24 in Australia. The figures swam in front of my eyes, and I felt like I was going to be sick and float through the ceiling all at once. Number 15 on the Billboard Albums Chart. For the longest moment, I just sat staring at the screen, then I let out a whoop that resonated through the entire backstage.

Doyle and Dick came running over - I just showed them the second email, and let them figure it out. Number 15. "It's the beard, man," laughed Doyle. "The moment you grew that beard, it's like we levelled up to the next level of serious."

Eventually, as the sight of his three bandmates leaping into the air and hugging one another became too intriguing to bear, Dieter came slouching over, wanting to know what was going on. "Beards are disgraceful. What are you lot on about?"

"Yeah, don't pretend that you and your Prince Albert are not impressed with that," Doyle laughed, and clapped Dieter on the back as he showed off the sales figures, before pulling him into a group hug. Dieter did not _do_ group hugs, and recoiled as if he had been burned. "Oh, stop it you pretentious shit," laughed Doyle and pulled him into a manly bear-hug from which Dieter's toothpick arms stuck out awkwardly. "Just pretend this is the happiest day of your life, coz it sure is ours."

Sales dropped slightly the second week, but it looked like the album was a winner. Some tour dates were already being rearranged, moved to bigger venues where they were available, and second nights being added in cities where they weren't. This was blowing up, and it was blowing up big. I felt vindicated. The gamble had paid off. Some of the critics were complaining about how we'd been dumbed down and slicked up compared to the first album, all the awkward edges sanded off for a more commercial sound, but I didn't care. Rolling Stone hailed it as a new, more mature sound, while the NME called it a dirty little album full of perverted sex anthems, which Doyle considered the best compliment that anyone could have paid him.

But the third week brought an email from Merry that broke my heart. 'No luck this month, boy-thing. You're off the hook again. Headed for Australia, I guess. See you on the flip side?'

I stared at the screen with mingled emotions of regret and relief stirring gently round the bottom of my stomach like wind-blown autumn leaves. Both of us were on tour for the next year, anyway. It was no time for a baby, to be honest. But why did it get harder for me to accept, each time, that it might not actually happen? That she might never marry me?

Touring got easier when the budgets were bigger, that was for certain. Simon was still our dedicated soundman, but Tony and Ronnie had brought in a team of roadies to hump our gear. I didn't even touch my amps or my pedalboard any more, they just appeared onstage when I walked out. To handle the increased number of people, we now had a double-decker tourbus. Downstairs there was a dining area with some tables, a storage area for our gear, a full kitchen with a fridge and a microwave, and a bathroom with not just a toilet, but a small shower. Upstairs had expanded to 12 bunkbeds, a small lounge with a stereo at the front, and a large lounge with a video player at the back. I ran up and down the stairs excitedly, climbing down to fetch a beer, then running between the front and back lounges like a puppy, trying to work out which one was cooler. The back lounge, I decided, looking through the videos to find something to watch. Our touring party had expanded so that I could not believe that we had ever travelled these roads in that dodgy old van.

I had got used to day rooms and showers in decent hotels, and a proper meal and a full rider at the venues. I had got slick at doing interviews with local press on my cell phone, a few days before the band rolled into town, and I was a seasoned pro at saying "This is Daniel from Metropolis and you're listening to K-RAP or W-S-H-I-T" into tape recorders for radio DJs across the country. I was getting used to frequent flyer miles that saw us bumped up to business class on long flights. I was getting used to magazine covers and photo shoots and television appearances, though really, OK, flying back to New York to tape Letterman between Christmas and New Year, OK, that was a bit of a trip. My parents watched Letterman. And as I hopped about the stage, doing my little mod dance to the swaggering opening bassline of _Ugly_ (Merry's swaggering bassline, I suddenly remembered) I thought of all my family around the world that would be turning on their televisions that night, and blinking as they asked "Is that little Danny Jr on stage?"

The album bobbed back up into the high 20s and stayed there for the first month or two of the new millennium. The 21st Century, it would belong to Metropolis. Merry was in Australia, but we celebrated the Millennium in style, with fireworks and a giant beach party in Santa Monica, where we headlined a massive festival at the foot of the pier.

For a couple of weeks, there was no word from Merry, and I wondered if there was internet in Australia, even as I continued to send missives off into the void. I had just got used to sending them; it helped to settle my mind to sit down every few days and put all my thoughts into one place, and send them off to Merry. And the tiny details of my daily life, on tour, they were there like a diary in the sent box of my email. I told her all the mundane annoyances of life on the road. The way that the two lounges of the bus had separated out, smoking and drug-taking in the back lounge, while Dick and I stuck to endless cups of tea in the front lounge. Duncan still wound up Dieter to an absurd degree, for reasons that no one could quite understand, because Duncan was just the most solid, grounded, placid slab of a man. But Doyle and Dick both appreciated the laid-back keyboard player. Dick liked him genuinely, what with the whole Texan thing, found him polite and thoughtful, with a lilting drawl to his accent, while I swear Doyle only liked him so much because Dieter hated him. But even when Dieter snapped at him, it was worth it not to suffer the poisonous presence of PCPete on the bus any more.

And finally, after three weeks of radio silence, Merry dropped into my inbox again, apologising profusely for not contacting me, but she had been in hospital in Australia, with a chest infection, brought on by the sweltering, dusty dry heat of an Australian Summer. I emailed back in a panic, was she alright, had she recovered enough to tour? She was OK, but she was still too weak to travel, so the tour had been postponed for a few weeks. Sitting watching surfers from the beach, unable to join them in the water, it was an odd kind of hell, but she would survive. 

Panic clutched my heart at the thought that she had been ill, and I'd not even known, let alone been there. Late one night, after a gig, I managed to get her on IRC, relieved just to see her words appearing on the screen in real-time as she typed them, as if that were proof of her existence. 'I'm worried. I wanna see you. Shall I fly out?'

'No, don't,' she typed back, far too quickly not to make me uneasy. 'When is Metropolis' next week off? Maybe I can fly out and PeterBook you somewhere. I should be well enough to travel soon.'

I consulted my diary, paging through month after month, booked solid with gigs, interviews, radio appearances. Taylor had us on a punishing 200-gigs-a-year schedule. 'April,' I typed back. 'We've got 6 days off the first week of April.'

'April...' appeared in my browser window, the cursor blinking as I imagined Merry chewing her lip the way she always did when she was thinking. 'I've got a fashion shoot booked in Paris for the first week of April. It's Dior... very prestigious, can't do a bunk on it. What's your next holiday?'

'Two weeks in June, though that'd have to be in NYC as it's technically festival rehearsal week.'

'Fucksake.'

A long pause as I started to wonder if she'd dropped the connection.

'Oh fuck it, Danny, come to Paris. It'll only be a day or so I have to work, maybe with a fitting. I'll book a hotel for a couple of days extra on each side, let's make a week of it.'

'Paris in the springtime... how can I resist? A week in Paris will do us both good.'

'Dammit, I just bet that fucking Michael will try to book some shows that week, but dammit, I'll do my best to keep it free, even if means breaking my leg to get the time off. After the shoot, of course...'

'Don't even joke about it, sweetie. I'm worried about your health after this mysterious viral infection.'

'It'll be fine. I'll see you in Paris, in the springtime, baby. Daw you but the health aide is here with breakfast now. xxx'

 

Metropolis criss-crossed the Atlantic again, flying back from New York to the UK for the start of our European tour. In Europe, we had a pleasant surprise, as Jorge from Mexican Summers joined the tour, supporting us with his new solo group - though all of us felt mildly embarrassed at the idea that Jorge should be supporting us, no matter how much bigger the venues we were playing had grown than that first tour where we supported him. Jorge didn't mind, in fact he told us all how proud of us he was. His little brothers, he called us, and regaled us with stories of some of the dodgier tours he'd been on, to which this was a walk in the park by comparison.

Even as _Ugly_ was still bouncing around the higher regions of the Modern Rock charts, we filmed another video in London, for the next single, _Bee-Sting_. We did this video with that Cunningham guy who had beat us to an award with his gender-bending bikini girls, and this one was as creepy as fuck, a dark, Ballardian nightmare of a drowned London with the band rowing about it in boats. Talk, dark and gaunt, Dieter worked a punt, his head swathed in a wreath of barbed wire and mosquito net, as Doyle lolled in the boat below him, stripped to the waist with his distinctive mermaid tattoo showing, rolling around as if in the grips of fever, as strange mutant robot-insects reached down to grab at them from the tops of drowned buildings. Dick sat, with the legs of his ruined suit rolled up to the knees, paddling in the water and firing off signal flares from the roof of the drowned National Gallery. I watched them all from a control room at the top of the BT Tower, flicking malevolent looking switches and triggering catastrophic floods of water in time to the torrents of guitar, as I tried to flood them out. It cost a fortune. It got us in the top twenty in the US and top ten in the UK.

We filmed our own Top Of The Pops appearance for _Bee-Sting_ (or _Beasting_ , as we all knew it really was, another ode to Doyle's lost girlfriend) on a sound stage in Shepherd's Bush. Top Of The Pops. I grinned like a fool at the logo, the audience, everything. My parents had told me that I was obsessed with the program when I was a child; some of my earliest memories were of begging to be allowed to stay up to watch it. My prepubescent sister had been in love with the singer of AbSynth, but me, I had preferred The Jam, Rick and Bruce in their sharp suits tearing up the set. And now we were playing on that infamous set at the BBC.

Without the emails home to Merry, I would forget all these tiny details, like miming our guitars to a backing track while only Doyle sung live. Dieter was a ham when he had to mime, nearly knocking himself unconscious by cracking his head on the headstock of his own bass as he tossed it around. People thought it was fake, Dieter performing on the television with a tiny trickle of blood down one temple, but for once it was all completely real.

The guitar riff on _Bee-Sting_ was a monster, huge and monolithic, one note strung out like a chime, cascading out over the tight funk of Dick and Dieter. (Though really it was just a straight rip of The Primitives' _Do The Ostrich_ , which Merry had found on Napster for me.) I swear to god, I could make the most obvious copies of songs, and the press never got it, they just saw our name on the record and claimed "sounds like Dead Letters" because of Doyle's resonant baritone. So I danced about on Top Of The Pops, holding my guitar up in the air like a flag as I hammered that one note, kicking my heels up as Doyle bent down low to the microphone, cupping his hands around it as he did his best Nick Cave croon. "She stings like a bee, we're beasting, coz she brings out the animal in me, you make a beast of yourself - we're beasting - she made a beast of me."

_Bee-Sting_ had its own controversy attached, as Dieter made some rather pointed smack jokes in Doyle's direction during press for the European tour. "A bee-sting," he explained to an attractive young television presenter, pretending for Dieter's benefit that she didn't have very good command of song lyrics. "Like a pin-prick," he explained, and then mimed shooting up for the camera. "The song is about the animal lurking beneath the civilised exterior of every human, and as writers from Thomas de Quincey to Baudelaire to William S. Burroughs have known, the quickest path to the beast within is via narcotics." Oh, fucking hell, Dieter. Another round of outraged discussion in the British tabloid press, another Comment Is Free column on oblique references to drugs in lyrics, another surge in the midweek sales figures. The whole thing was starting to feel awfully familiar.

But as I watched the charts to see my band's progress, I was just as concerned by what I did not see. The first Deltawave single from the new album, a Merry solo performance, had charted, placing respectably in the teens. The second single, a duet between the pair of them, had tanked. The album slid out of the top 40, down to 57, to 82, then dropped off the charts, too, even as Semantics hung around bobbing from the 30s up to the 20s again as our tour passed through major markets.


	32. Kiss You In Paris

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel and Merry's holiday in Paris becomes a working holiday as Daniel is invited along to be an 'accessory' on Merry's prestigious fashion shoot. Or perhaps it's just an excuse for lots of Jane & Serge style antics and a whole heap of suit pr0n. (No, really, how do you cope with an erection in skin-tight rock star trousers?
> 
> Trigger Warning: there may be some ED discussion of fasting and weight in the modelling world which some readers may be sensitive towards. Merry is starting to overcome this pressure. But take care of yourself if this kind of talk is damaging to you.

Miraculously, over the next few months, nothing happened with either Metropolis or Deltawave to scupper our week together in Paris. In fact, a few weeks before we were due to get together, an email from Merry landed in my inbox.

I mean, that in itself wasn't unusual; we tried to write each other every day. In fact, she had bought two tiny digital cameras while on tour in Japan, and posted one to me care of the London office, so I'd got used to exchanging blurry selfies by email every morning. Me, rumpled and bleary, nursing an insomniac's cup of coffee in Vienna; her, with her hair still braided, squinting at me from between hotel sheets somewhere in California. But that day, the usual morning selfie came attached with a short note.

'Hey sweetie, just a quick question - and you can totally say no if you're not into it. When I just mentioned to my contact at Dior that I was going to be staying the week in Paris with you, she asked if you wanted to be in the shoot. You can totally say no! I know fashion shoots are boring as hell, and I completely understand if you would rather skip it, but I did promise I would ask you and now I've asked. See you soon, daw you to bits, Merry'

I stared at the email for a few minutes, trying to make up my mind. I mean, obviously my first reaction was no way, no fucking way, even the idea was absurd. But then, y'know, I have to admit, my curiosity was piqued. I mean, it was ridiculous, right? I knew I was not the most good-looking guy in the world, in fact, I was well aware I was not even the most good-looking guy in my band. And yet, here I was, being asked to model? Me. And underneath the top 20 album and the rock star trappings of fame, I was still very much the short, scrawny guy with unruly hair and a prominent, slightly crooked nose. Modelling for Dior. I didn't know whether to be flattered, or just laugh my head off, OK?

So I wrote back and said to Merry 'Hey, you know, maybe? Like, what did they have in mind? Am I just going to be one of your accessories, the de rigeur rock star boyfriend? Am I going to have to pose, or just stand around wearing suits and trying to look cool? XO, D'

'No, they want you to actually wear some Dior Homme. The designer's totally into it. The creative director's come up with this whole idea of doing something very sexy, kinda rock'n'roll, but also classy and totally Parisian, like, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. You do *not* have to do this if you don't want, but if you're up for it... let me know. Daw you, Merry'

I could not believe that I was considering this. But then I thought about all those unspeakably cool Serge Gainsbourg album covers, and you know, Serge Gainsbourg was a short, scrawny kind of guy with a nose about twice as large and twice as crooked as mine, and that guy was considered a major sex symbol in France. Why the fuck not? If it looked ridiculous, well, no one in New York ever had to know.

'Are they going to pay me?' I teased. 'I know you don't get out of bed for under ten grand a day or whatever. But I guess I'll do it if I can get a free Hedi Slimane suit out of it? Tell 'em those are my conditions. Je t'aime, Je t'aime, Oui, Je t'aime... XO, D'

'Moi non plus,' wrote back Merry, and I could almost hear her laughter in the plain text of my inbox. 'Hedi's totally up for it. Send me your measurements, and you can have your suit. To be honest, I think he's chuffed as hell. He loves the idea of Metropolis wearing his clothes, absolutely perfect for his image. See you in Paris! Daw you, Merry'

_Hedi_. I mean, I could never quite get over it, the casual, first-name way Merry referred to celebrities - Hedi, Karen, Matthew - that I only ever read about in The Face and i-D. Well, this would certainly be interesting. I got a "Learn French in Two Weeks" CD and a phrasebook and started to practice.

When April came and our tour wound up in London, I sent my instruments and the bulk of my stuff back to New York with the band, but packed my own suitcase and Peter-Booked the Eurostar over to France. I took a taxi down from Gare du Nord, feeling my heart singing as I caught glimpses of blossom all along the boulevards. Merry had found a beautiful hotel on the Left Bank, with a view of the church of St Germaine, right in the heart of the city. I paid the driver, and looked about me, inhaling deeply, taking in the smell of springtime, the chatter of French about me on the streets, the beautiful, mellow old architecture shining in the afternoon sun.

When I got to the front desk, I told the concierge in halting French that my partner had made a reservation, as I dug in my bag, before producing a print-out of the email that Merry had sent me. The concierge looked at the email, checked his computer, then smiled at me. <<Madame Asheton is already in the room. You may go directly up.>>

_Madame Asheton_. I could get used to this.

A bellhop took my suitcase and guided me up the tiny elevator to the top floor. He produced an electronic key and let me into the suite, but I could see Merry nowhere. She must have popped out to the shops or something. But her clothes were already spread about the room as if her suitcase had exploded. Draped all over the sofa and chairs were a dress, a negligee, a pair of white, thigh-high stockings, and a sort of cantilevered bra-bustier thing that made me perhaps a little bit more excited than I cared to admit. Shaking my head despairingly, I walked about, picking up the clothes, catching the vague scent of her that still clung to them, the underwired cup of her bra, the slightly damp patch in her stockings at the back of her knee where her perspiration collected. Almost on instinct, I raised them to my face and inhaled, and the faint whiff of Merry-ness juddered through me like a drug. But as I carried them over to the wardrobe to hang them up, I heard the patter of the shower from next door, and smelled the distinctive coconut-almond of her hair products. So she was here.

I hung up my suit jacket, and put my own few changes of clothes away, then poked about at a pile of CDs she'd left lying by the entertainment centre. What had she been listening to? Ah, Serge Gainsbourg, of course. I pressed play and was rewarded with the subtle string arrangements of _Melody Nelson_. Under the CDs was what my sister always called a 'look book' - really just another binder, though this was embossed with the distinctive Dior logo. It was a kind of guide, the visual equivalent of a mixtape, not just photos of clothes - though obviously there were endless clothes, beautiful, cool, 60s inspired clothes - but also musicians and movie stars and film stills. There were several pages of reference photos of Serge Gainsbourg with Jane Birkin, and for a second I did a double-take, because there was a photo of a tall, elegant, coltish blonde wrapped around a short, kinda weird-looking bloke with a crooked nose and way too much curly hair. Honestly, it could have been Merry and me.

I traced the photo of Serge and Jane with my fingertips, wondering if we could ever look this cool at the photo shoot. Serge, dapper in his pinstripes, was staring at Jane with an intense but slightly soppy expression of devotion that seemed almost embarrassingly familiar from my own face, while Jane, in minidress and thigh-high stockings, smirked at the camera, one of her endlessly long legs wrapped around his thighs, with an unmistakable air of possession. I dunno. That picture both enticed me and kinda turned me on; but also made me feel like a voyeur, like I was encroaching on a couple's private moment of affection. It was intensely erotic, but it wasn't like those awful porn movies that Dieter watched, not at all. These were two people totally in the flush of intensely carnal love. And I didn't know if that made it worse or better. Feeling weird and ever so slightly creepy, I closed the look book and put it back down under the stack of CDs.

Shuffling back to the sitting area, I found a small spread of fresh fruit and a bucket of my favourite wine on ice, so I opened it, and poured two glasses in anticipation. Relaxing completely for the first time in months, I put my feet up and stared contentedly out the window across the rooftops of Paris. I could not have asked for a more romantic setting to be reunited with my lover, the late afternoon sun gilding the city's chimneys with a golden glow.

Next door, the shower switched off, and I heard scattered fragments of my girlfriend singing along with snatches of The Ballad Of Melody Nelson, as I smirked to myself and nursed my wine. But as the door opened, abruptly there was a little cry of surprise. "Danny! You're early!"

"I took a cab," I shrugged, climbing to my feet, but she was across the room in an instant, a towel knotted above her breasts, wet hair flying everywhere as she flung her arms around my waist, almost soaking me.

"I was going to surprise you..." As she pulled back slightly, she looked around the room. "What have you done with my new lingerie?"

I laughed what I hoped was a devilish laugh. "I don't need you in clothes," I teased.

"Yeah, but maybe _I_ wanted to wear them? To feel sexy? To feel like a woman again?"

"As if you need any help at all, at being sexy." I pulled at the knot in her towel, so that it fell away. My god, sometimes, when I looked at her, at her long, lithe limbs, at her beautiful breasts, at the gentle swell of her hips, I swear to god it made my knees actually shake, with fear as much as desire. Don't get me wrong, I loved the morning selfies, they made each others' absence tolerable, but they sometimes made me forget the breathtaking physical presence of the actual girl, especially when she stood naked in my arms.

Merry stepped out of the towel with a laugh, and kicked it away, shaking out her hair so that it cascaded across her back. But then she stepped towards me, and held me gently by the shoulders, staring deep into my eyes. "Well, here we are at last, only three and a bit years late," she said mysteriously.

"Three and a bit years? It's been... what, only a couple months? When did I last see you? November?" We spoke to each other so often online it seemed unreal that it had really been over three months since I last held her in my arms. 

"No, I mean, finally. I've waited long enough. Tonight you will be kissing me in Paris," she giggled.

I had forgotten, though it seemed both about ten minutes and about ten years since I had flirted clumsily with her on the pavement outside the Lacuna Lounge. "Oh, indeed." Then I reached up, cupped her face in my palms, and pulled her down towards me, pushing my tongue between her lips and feeling her suck it inside her. Yes, kissing her in Paris was everything I had ever imagined it might be. And when I pulled away, her eyes sparkled. "Wow," I said.

"Wow," she agreed, and grabbed me by the belt and pulled me into bed.

That first evening, I was so loathe to climb out of bed, I didn't even want to stroll down to the river by moonlight. Paris didn't seem quite real as we crossed a bridge, holding hands, and made our way up winding streets. It felt vaguely make-believe, sitting in a fairy-lamp lit cafe, watching my beautiful girlfriend dip crusty, home-made bread into her fondue. I hadn't really wanted to come out; I had just wanted to crawl into bed with her and never get out, wanted to try to pretend that we lived an ordinary life, even though I had busted my ass to earn this extraordinary one. It hardly seemed like my real life of endless tourbuses and stinky backstages, this dreamlike evening, sitting in that tiny bistro, toasting one another with glasses of wine that reflected the candle-light up into one another's faces.

But she stopped me  as I tried to hail a cab back to the hotel. "No," she insisted. "I want to take the Metro. I want to see the real Paris, not be whisked about in a taxi."

"Come on, you gotta be kidding," I laughed, as she pulled me towards the ornate Art Nouveau entrance to the trains. "Rock stars don't take the Metro."

That stopped her short, as she suddenly pulled me towards her, staring at me with a weird pleading look on her face. "Danny, for this holiday, apart from the photo shoot, can we just _not_ be rock stars? Can we just be two ordinary young people, in love, in the City of Romance?"

For a moment, I had a mental flashback, remembering two young kids, him in an ill-fitting vintage suit, her in a white dress and go-go boots, sitting in the front booth of the Lacuna Lounge, playing _let's pretend_. Back then, when we'd played make believe, our favourite fantasy was to pretend that we were rock stars. Was our favourite fantasy now to pretend that we were not? But the forlorn expression on her face stopped me from voicing the irony. "OK," I agreed, squeezing her hand and playing along. "This week, we're not rock stars, then. We're... Madame et Monsieur..." I glanced around at the shop fronts, looking for a name. "Thibault. Pierre et Francoise Thibault, mais oui?"

Merry's eyes lit up with pleasure. "I love it," she giggled as we padded down the steps into the station. "Pierre, mon amour." And the names stuck, for the rest of the weekend. We used them at restaurants, and at the theatre, and on the street. 

The next day, the morning before our photo shoot, my presence was requested at the venerable fashion house, for a fitting of my suit. I was a little bit intimidated, to be honest, but Merry went with me, leading me past the ostentatious front door of the shop to the offices and studios upstairs. She acted like a total pro, smiling and waving at the receptionist as we breezed in, calling out and greeting her with nonchalant familiarity. A beautiful and immaculately dressed young women appeared, escorted us through into a room lined with mirrors. Merry gravitated immediately to a rack of clothes along one wall, flicking through them with casual expertise as I nervously checked my hair for about the billionth time.

"Oh, I hope this is what I'm wearing tomorrow, I absolutely love this," she told the young woman, picking out a white lace crocheted sort-of dress thing and holding it up against her chest. Hanging back, leaning against the wall, I watched as the pair of them picked over the rack, before Merry, giggling, pulled out a pair of butch-looking black leather trousers. "Oh, look what you'll be wearing, Danny."

"I bloody well hope not," I almost growled, but the young French woman laughed.

"Oh, no, those were a special order, custom made for Mick."

"I would have thought he was a bit too old for leather," Merry laughed cattily. "Where's Danny's suit? Can't wait to see it."

With a cheerful buzz of chatter, a small troupe of people entered the room, and the garment was produced with a little flourish. It was absolutely beautiful, even I had to admit, a soft, dark, charcoal grey with a very subtle pinstripe. But it was tiny, looking about the size of clothes I might have worn around ninth grade.

"Well, go on, try it on," Merry urged, as I held it up.

"I..." I stuttered, looking around at the people, the endlessly reflecting mirrors, then I threw a pleading glance at my girlfriend.

"Oh, sorry, I forgot. He's shy," Merry explained, with that slightly apologetic smile.

An assistant produced a curtain from a hidden recess in the wall, and I retreated behind it, even while I saw Merry just pull her dress off over her head to try on the crochet-thing she liked so much. Safely hidden away - well, as much as possible, in a room full of mirrors - I stripped off my old suit and pulled on the new. Wow. It was... wow. I turned to the mirror-wall and observed myself. The Italian suits I had taken to wearing, they were designed to widen my shoulders and make my skinny legs look more substantial with their slightly boot-legged cut. This suit wasn't just cut to show my thinness, it was cut to accentuate it, with a dropped waist down below my belly, and narrowly pegged trousers. The jacket was short and boxy, sitting above my hips, so that a good portion of my butt felt very exposed. The lines were simple, clean, streamlined, and it hung beautifully from my narrow shoulders, but my god, it made me look _tiny_. I mean, there was slender, and there was 'good stiff breeze would blow him away.'

"How is it?" called the young French assistant.

As I emerged, nervously, from behind the silver curtain, I felt very exposed. "Well, I just about managed to get _into_ it..." I quipped, standing up straighter, as there was not the room in the thing to slouch. I liked jackets with voluminous pockets in which to store guitar picks, capos, even demo CDs, but this one curved inwards as it hung, hugging my waist, barely leaving room for a sharpie.

But as she saw me, Merry's eyes positively lit up. "It's _beautiful_ ," she almost whispered, with that hungry edge to her voice that reassured me that she still totally fancied me in it.

"Non," disagreed a tall, hulking man with an intense stare, observing me carefully. I mean, if I was scrawny, this guy looked like a beanpole, hooded eyes peering out over a hawk's nose. <<Take it in here>> He poked at my waist. <<And here, and here.>> Another finger stab at my thighs, and then at my buttocks.

"Hey, hey." I danced away from him lightly, testing out the give of the fabric. "I need to be able to move onstage in it. I need to play guitar, and to... well, to dance!" I flexed my arms carefully, pretended to play guitar, then risked a couple of stage moves. I mean, it was hard, with those giant mirrors everywhere, to resist the urge to strut and preen, and, y'know, play a bit of air guitar.

The beanpole guy watched me carefully as I moved. Merry's eyes followed me with a pleasure that reassured me I still _had it_.  <<OK>> he finally conceded. <<We put in darts here, and here, to aid movement.>> He brushed his fingers lightly across my shoulders, where the fabric caught slightly. <<But the derrière needs to come in another two, three centimetres.>>

When I finally took the new suit off, and replaced the old one, it felt odd, like I was wearing pyjamas whose cuffs flapped around my legs. And then I sat in a corner as it was Merry's turn to be poked and prodded and have clothes hung over her and the seams nipped in or let out as required. And watching all these tiny, frail, skinny Parisians hovering around my beautiful girlfriend, poking her lovely arse and telling her, with slight clucks of their tongues, that it was half a centimetre wider than her stated dimensions, I suddenly felt very, very weird, and more than slightly protective.

When we finally left, I put my arm around her in the elevator, and squeezed her arse gently. "You know you are the most beautiful woman in the world," I told her, as the doorman called us an asked-for cab. Merry just made a face and retreated to the back seat. "So where do you want to go for lunch?"

Merry looked at me like I was crazy. "Come on, I can't _eat_ , between now and the shoot, are you kidding?"

I frowned. "You are joking."

She shook her head. "Nothing but green tea from now until then. Maybe a sports drink tomorrow for the energy and the electrolytes."

"You don't expect me to just... _not eat_ , for 24 hours... in _Paris_ , do you?" I sputtered. "You know, _France_ , the magical land of amazing cheese?"

The look on her face almost slayed me. "Well, I guess you can go out and quickly hit a fromagerie or something? But not too late. I have to get a decent night's rest if I'm going to be on my feet all day."

She was up at the crack of dawn, _exfoliating_ or whatever, sitting with cream on her face and cucumbers on her eyes so she couldn't shoot me dirty looks as I downed coffee and croissants - butter croissants so flakey and delicate they seemed to dissolve on my tongue - for breakfast. As I headed for the shower, she called out after me, "Don't wash your hair or anything, they'll do all that for you."

"I can wash my own damned hair," I called back, and trimmed my serious beard around my lips with her nail scissors. As I dressed, Merry changed her bra and underwear three times before settling on something scanty and peach-coloured she hoped wouldn't show underneath the clothes. Then the concierge rang the room to tell us that the car from Dior was there, and I scooped up my fussing girlfriend and delivered her downstairs and on our way.

I thought I was used to photographic shoots after, like, six or seven years of being in a band. I was used to turning up, having a stylist fuss over my hair, maybe dab a bit of powder on my forehead to stop it shining if we were going on TV, and then posing underneath bright lights, trying not to sweat too hard in a photographer's studio or in a hotel lobby. But nothing had prepared me for a fashion shoot, which seemed as complicated, and involved as many people, as a full Hollywood film production. I was a little awed, OK? But Merry just shrugged and strode on in like this was just a normal day of going to work for her.

The 'Creative Director' had chosen a smoky basement bistro for the _ambiance_ , but of course the natural light was not enough, so they'd brought in an army of lights and those shiny silver baffles they used to deflect and diffuse. I wasn't entirely sure about the location, I mean, it was really pretty clichéd, right down to the beaded curtains and the candles stuck into winebottles spread out on the tables with checked tableclothes and everything. Like, this was the kind of level of cliché of doing a 'punk' fashion shoot at CBGBs, and I made a catty comment under my breath to that effect to Merry, but she just laughed and said "You know, it's funny you should say that, because that was the other suggestion that the Creative Director had. He wanted to shoot New York musicians in an 'authentic' New York nightclub. He took some convincing that there was little left that was 'authentic' about CBGBs - or even the Lacuna - these days."

"So we ended up in an 'authentic' Parisian bistro instead." I shrugged and rolled my eyes. "I suppose it could be worse; there could be a jazz band in the background."

"Don't give them ideas," giggled Merry.

The stylist from the previous day appeared, and Merry was whisked off to a film-star trailer for hair and makeup, while I was shuffled off in a different direction to try on my suit. Christ, the thing fit like a glove now. When I put it on, noting the difference in comfort that the darts made when I swung my arms around, I did actually notice that it immediately made me stand up straighter and hold my head up a little taller. Hedi had worked his magic. I didn't look like an awkward schoolboy, I looked like a fucking rock star in tight-ass trousers that... well, hot damn, I adjusted myself _very_ carefully to tuck myself inside, and just prayed to god I didn't get an erection.

Hair and make-up came to pester me next, and I was glad I had actually washed my hair, because the woman immediately wet it down and filled it with product and started to brush it up and over into a kind of quiff. I tried to protest that I'd tried that before, back in Manchester a million years ago, and it looked terrible, but the woman barely spoke English and batted my hands away, styling my hair up off my face to give me another inch or two in height. Actually, it looked quite good. It wasn't a helmet-headed rocker quiff, it was a looser, more relaxed, Gallic looking crest of hair, with my curls pulled into soft waves. And then, just as I was starting to be OK with the process, I got a face full of powder to tone down the shine on my nose. Ugh! That stuff always made me feel like I had a film of something gross on my skin, I didn't know how girls could stand it.

There were other suits for me to try on, just as skinny and just as flattering, though these, I noted, were only loosely stitched into place and not tailored as ferociously as my pinstripe. I would have to change several times, to do several different tableaux. Well! And here was me just thinking I'd be some ornament that Merry would wear on her arm. Honestly, this was starting to look suspiciously like hard work.

Finally, I was released, and wandered out to Merry's little film-star cabin to see how she was getting on. Merry rated a name on her trailer door, with a little note stating Dior, and the date of the collection. I knocked, and she called out cheerily for me to come in, though I was not prepared for the scene within. As one woman brushed away at Merry's hair, and another made last-minute adjustments to the white crochet dress with a needle and thread, Merry was just standing there in knickers, thigh-high stockings and no bra. Oh Christ, so much for not getting an erection!

<<If there is no room for bra, possible I have little pasties so my nipples not to show?>> my goddess called out, in broken French, to the stylist with the needle.

<<Your nipples are supposed to show; that's the point!>> the seamstress replied with a laugh, holding the dress up and shaking it out gently. It shimmered slightly as it moved, that pearlescent silver-white that always made Merry's skin glow.

Merry made a face, then rolled her eyes and shrugged. She turned to me as if it were completely normal to be carrying on a conversation with three people while almost totally naked. "Are you terribly bored yet, my love? I mean, this is it. The exciting fashion world, now you see, it's hours and hours of standing around in poorly heated rooms waiting for something to happen."

"Just like rock'n'roll," I quipped, and tried to kiss her, but she batted me away.

"Careful, my makeup."

That caught me out. From a distance, she had been made up to look completely natural, with even her freckles showing through, but when I saw her close up, I realised that she was absolutely caked in layers and layers of thick make-up to attain that effect. Her naturally high cheekbones were carved out with underpainting, the scar on her brow had been covered up, and the wide-eyed eyelashes glued on, to make her already huge eyes look even larger. Even the freckles weren't really hers, they were faked, Baudrillardian hyper-freckles.

<Come on, come on, it's ready. Let's get you sewed into this>> said the stylist, moving over to Merry and helping her pull the dress over her head without mussing hair or makeup. The dress was absolutely stunning, hugging her curves, but the stylist pulled it tight until it fit her like a second skin. Her peach-coloured underpants did not show against her creamy skin, but the effect of the dark smears of her nipples peeking through the lace, wow, well that was... I had to shift slightly in my trousers. <<It's _very_ Jane Birkin >> the stylist pronounced.

Merry turned towards me, swinging her hips back and forth so that the gauzy fabric of the dress swirled about her thighs. She clearly loved the dress, and its lines flattered her body, nipples or no nipples. "You totally hate it, don't you?" she teased, and suddenly it felt a bit like some kind of test.

"I don't hate it, it's a beautiful dress," I hedged.

Merry let out a little giggle. "He has such a problem with nudity, my Danny. He thinks it's so vulgar. He absolutely hates it when I make a _spectacle_ of my body." She addressed this ostensibly to the seamstress, who smiled and rolled her eyes, but Merry was looking at me the whole time.

"I don't hate it. You have a beautiful body," I admitted, with slightly more honesty than I was expecting. "It just makes me kinda sad when people only appreciate you for your beautiful body, and ignore how phenomenally talented you are, as a musician and a songwriter."

Merry and the seamstress both laughed, and exchanged looks. "Ooh la la! Ille est un homme tres _feministe_ ," the stylist observed, raising her eyebrow so I couldn't tell if she was being ironic or not. That 'ooh la la' made me feel rather like I was being played for a fool.

<<Well, only have I been been training him since about three year now!>> Merry laughed.

"...and I'm going to shut up now, because no matter what I say, I'm going to be in trouble, right? Are we ready, can we go on the set now?"

Modelling was weird. It was a bit of a mindfuck, how something could be somehow both incredibly boring, and oddly exciting, and at the same time mind-numbingly dull, and yet back-achingly hard work. I posed like I always did in photographs, strike a pose, and then wait for the camera's click to just generally move my face slightly up, down, to the left, showing my profile but not too much because of my awkward nose, smiling a little, but not so much you could see my slightly British teeth. I mean, I had learned, over the course of several years, how to look OK in photos, how to smile with my eyes and project energy and how my pointed little chin always looked better angled down a little.

I had expected Merry to do something similar, strike a pose, turn, strike another, like, y'know, a RuPaul video or something. But Merry was a churn of constant motion, moving gracefully but artfully, like a dancer, never resting in any one position. There was a specific light in her eye that I knew really well, that restless, slightly mischievous spark of naughtiness that made it impossible not to look at her, and I was astonished at how she was able to just turn it on, once the camera was on her. I never realised just how much effort she put into it, but it was obvious from the way that the clothes, which looked just lifeless garments when they were on the rack, a little bit like sloughed skins, seemed to come to life and take on some magical aura when she put them on. I mean, I thought I knew how _Style_ worked, the difference it made to a man between wearing a casual pair of Levis and a white T-shirt, or wearing a well-cut suit. But in this case, the clothes didn't make the woman. Merry was somehow making the clothes seem cool, just by wearing them.

We did a couple of scenes: standing up by the bar, holding glasses full of tea coloured to look like spirits; seated at a table, Merry's long legs splayed out beneath her; standing dramatically in doorways, smouldering at one another over glasses of phoney wine. The Creative Director put on a record to set the mood; I had been expecting more Serge and Jane, but instead it was the smoky, bluesy rasp of an early Nothings record, very raw, very rock'n'roll, and almost irresistible not to dance to, so I felt myself start to relax a bit, but it was still a bit weird, feeling that camera on us, constantly.

I didn't know where to look, to be honest. In photoshoots for Metropolis, we were usually directed to look straight at the camera. Merry had once told me to stare at the camera like the person I most wanted to fuck in the world was on the other side. So of course, I always imagined Merry. But that was impossible, now that Merry was standing opposite me, smiling at me mysteriously from under those ridiculously long fake lashes, those dark patches of nipple only inches from my suit lapels. I found I couldn't really look at the camera; I just stared at Merry with that abject look of lust and awe I always found myself gazing at her with. We were on the tiny dance floor now, in front of a small raised platform that had been artfully graced with a couple of guitars, a drumkit and a double bass, and I was very tempted to put my arms around her and swing her in a lazy slow dance.

But the photographer seemed to like it. <<Go on, you can touch the girl!>> he urged. <<We want sexy, give us sexy.>>

Reaching out, I grabbed Merry by the hip and pulled her roughly towards me. Surprised, she looked up at me, her haughty _I am modelling_ expression breaking for a moment into that panting smoulder of pure lust, like she really wanted me, right there and then. No, no, not too sexy, calm down, I told myself, feeling my cock stiffening against the impossibly tight trousers.

<<Yes, yes, more of that>> directed the photographer, as I put my hands on my girlfriend and pulled her towards me, mostly to try to cover my erection, but also because she just looked so incredibly beautiful, the white crochet dress almost sparkling under the hot photographer's lights, and I was reminded of an instant of that first moment I saw her stepping into my studio apartment on Ludlow St, shimmering like an angel.

I started to move. We danced lazily, as the photographer picked the camera off its stand and followed us, shooting more naturally from a hand-held position. Snap. Hey, I could get used to this, I thought to myself, as I spun her around, then clutched her close as if we were dancing a strange tango. Snap, snap. She pressed herself up against me, smouldering for all she was worth, and Christ, that stiffy of mine was going nowhere. Snap. I cradled her in my arms, staring deeply into her eyes, put my hand on the small of her back, then impetuously moved it down to that tiny band of peach-coloured skin between the tops of her stockings and the bottom of her minidress. Snap, snap, snap. Merry stiffened, arching her back, sending her pert breasts skywards, as her lips parted. She was no longer playing, she was genuinely turned on, I could see that in her eyes. Snap, snap. Seizing her leg, I pulled it upwards and she wrapped it around my other thigh, in a faint echo of the photo I'd seen in her look book a few evenings earlier. Snap. The atmosphere in that grotty basement sizzled, despite the glaring lights, the camera, the dozen people wandering around the set, all I could concentrate on was Merry, feeling how badly we wanted each other. Despite the powder, I could feel a prickle at the back of my neck, where sweat was starting to curl my hair. My trousers were almost unbearably tight; I felt like I was about to explode.

<<OK, just a moment, get me the other camera, with the fresh memory card>> the photographer barked, and we were released.

<<Coming up directly, Charles>> bounced back from the depths of the room.

I laughed aloud, the spell broken, and loosed my grip on Merry as the photographer grumbled at his assistant at how long the changeover was taking. Hell, I could remember when everybody still used film and you'd break a photoshoot for ten minutes while the photographer changed the roll and your bandmates all grabbed a cigarette.

Merry laughed lightly, then playfully slipped slowly down to her knees to take a short rest. She wrapped her arms around my thigh possessively, pretending to take a little bite before staring up at me with such dazzling lust in her eyes it almost made me dizzy. "Oh, Christ," I whimpered, shifting my hips uncomfortably to try and relieve the tension of the tight fabric off my aching cock, though really, I didn't particularly want to dislodge her from my leg.

"Oh, is this bothering you?" Merry teased, reaching up to touch my cock through my trousers, as if she were going to adjust me to a more comfortable position, but really she just wanted to torment me by brushing her hand against me, her fingertips searching for that super-sensitive fold under my bell-end.

"Stop it! I need to..." With the hand that wasn't somehow tangled in her hair, I reached to adjust myself. "Ow, the trousers are too tight now, I need to undo the belt to shift..."

<<Don't>> snapped the stylist. <<If you untuck your shirt, we'll have to iron it again. If your _beet_ is too noticeable, we can always... how you say? _Air-brush-ez_. >>

The word sounded so comical in Franglais that I laughed again, and raised my eyebrows naughtily as I looked down at Merry to share the joke. Merry was making like she was going to bite me again, her eyes absolutely dancing with mischief, curled against my leg like a minx.

"Merrrr-ie!" called the photographer - Charles - and she turned her head, laying her cheek against my thigh, and flashed him with such a _look_... snap.

As he snapped the picture, I had no idea that this was the one they would eventually use. Merry and I were just fooling around, teasing one another, playing, with the same erotic intimacy we'd been enjoying back at our hotel. The heat, the lights, the sexy, raw music all combined to create this dream-like atmosphere where I was somehow comfortable fooling around with my girlfriend. I was a fool; I should have known it in my bones that that would end up being the defining icon of that session: Merry on her knees at my feet, pretending like she was about to give me a blow job.

We took another few photos in those outfits, but I guess the photographer already knew we had the moneyshot, so the Creative Director called a ten minute break and sent us out to change and powder our noses. But I grabbed Merry's hand as we climbed the stairs out into the cool of the spring afternoon, refreshing after the steamy heat of the photographer's lights.

"Man, I really want to kiss you so bad right now, but that would muss your makeup, wouldn't it?" I told her, settling for nuzzling her ear instead.

"Danny," she whispered back, her eyes wide. "Right now, I want to drag you off in the back room and suck your cock till you sing high soprano, but that would _really_ muss my lipstick."

Do you know how hard it was to go back into my little portacabin and just quietly adjust myself and change into another suit, without having a wank then and there? But no, it was actually a slight relief to step out of my pinstripe and into a marginally looser black silk which actually allowed me half a centimetre of breathing room by comparison. And Merry reappeared a few minutes later in a sort of brocade number with a plunging decollete that made me wonder how on earth it stayed up. And we flirted and smouldered and pouted at one another through the rest of the spring/summer collection.

I mean, it was actually _tough_! I was sweating bullets under those lights, and found myself growing desperately hungry, but ridiculously, there was no eating on set! Not just because they didn't want to risk staining the clothes, but because of some nonsense about not wanting full bellies ruining the lines of the clothes. Merry survived on sips of her sports drinks - not too much because she had to be cut out of and sewn back into the clothes if she even needed to pee! - and the occasional glucose tablet to give her a burst of energy. But man, I could not live on glucose tablets, especially not while I could smell the lighting technicians chowing down on those little baguette sandwiches with the melty brie and the sliced grapes. By the time we finished, around midnight, I was starting to feel genuinely light-headed and more than a little high, like, I had no idea you could actually get high from fasting, and started to wonder if that was part of the appeal for those model-thin girls.

Even after the shoot was officially over, Merry followed me into my little cabin. With a naughty expression, she slipped her dress up over her head, and picked up my tailored pinstripe suit, sliding it up over her naked skin. I turned to see a slender, blond boy standing smirking at me. Well, half a boy. My shirt didn't quite fit her, it wouldn't button over her breasts, so I could see the curve of them disappearing under the lapels of the jacket.

"It almost makes it fun again, modelling with you," she let slip, as she dug through the rack for one of my ties, knotting it so that it hung down between her breasts.

"If you don't enjoy it, you should stop. It's not like you need the exposure any more."

"I need the money, though," she confessed, and I was about to tell her that really, we didn't, we were fine for money now that I had an album on the charts, but she turned to me with an odd expression. "Back when I first started, I always used to insist on doing it with Gabe. And he just treated it like such a lark, we just had a ton of fun, like, tickling and goosing one another and trying to make each other laugh. I don't know when it stopped being fun, but it did. But you... you make it seem like a good time again."

I flicked her nose affectionately, wondering if I could kiss her yet, or if she needed to get all that make-up removed first. So instead I wound her hair into a loose bun and turned her so that both of us were facing the mirror.

But she laughed when she saw us, a pair of slim rock boys in the mirror. With her long blond bangs hanging in her face, she reminded me almost uncomfortably of Doyle, but she clearly had other ideas. Without even bothering to find a pair of shoes, she danced back out into the bistro. "Look everybody, I'm Danny," she called. "I'm in Metropolis now!" And suddenly everyone stopped to stare.

The Creative Director's jaw dropped. <<OK, we have got to get this one on film!>>

So the crew were called back and Charles got out another camera and another tableau lined up, Merry and I sitting, two louche, sexy boys playing cards, were it not for the almost completely visible outline of her breasts peeking out from under her jacket. OK, so maybe I asked Charles if we could have a private print of that one where her shirt totally slipped and you could see her nipples. And asked quite deliberately within Merry's earshot, since maybe I was still sulking slightly from that 'vulgar' comment. Plus, it was late and the heat and the lights had gone to my head, I swear it wasn't like I was actually trying to encourage my girlfriend to revive her topless career. Really, I just liked the way she looked in my suit, and wanted a memento of the day, and OK, hot damn, she looked drop dead fucking gorgeous.

But I did, indeed, get to keep the pinstripe skinny suit. And as a token of esteem, the designer actually made Merry a gift of that gorgeous white crochet minidress. (Though, to be honest, if she was going to be wearing that thing outside of our bedroom, really, I did actually think maybe she should wear a bra.) But I limped away, exhausted and bone-weary from standing all day, with a new appreciation of Merry's day job.

In the cab home, I wrapped my arm around her slumped shoulders and pulled her close. "OK, I know I tease you about the whole not getting out of bed for less than ten meeeeellion dollars a day or whatever, but hot damn, that was hard work. I cannot wait to get back to the hotel and order supper off room service. Maybe two suppers each, since we skipped lunch."

Merry shook her head solemnly. "No. I have been far too bad already on this holiday. I knew that fondue on the first night was a bad idea - Jules is right, my measurements were out by a whole centimetre. It's nothing but celery sticks from here on in."

" _Merry_ ," I was about to protest, but the odd look in her eye stopped me. Cindy's warning hung in the back of my head. I had to make our relationship a safe space, where she could exercise control. "OK, suit yourself, my beautiful little supermodel." Bending down, I kissed the top of her head.

She made a distasteful face, like I'd just called her something awful and insulting. "I'm not a fucking supermodel."

"D'accord," I said, echoing the affirmation we'd been hearing all day. "My beautiful little Chanteuse."

"Oh, that's even worse."

"What can I call you, then?" I squeezed my arm around her a bit tighter as she buried her face in my chest. "My beautiful little _bassist_?"

"D'accord," she murmured into my lapel.

But when we got back to the hotel, she nibbled virtuously on a pear from the fruit basket as I rang room service. "OK, let's see..." I mused, perusing the menu for the vegetarian options. "Let's get a cheese platter up here, yes, the large platter, and have you got the granary bread to go with that? Oh, perfect, yes, and the little dishes of preserves, that'd be great. Baked camembert - that's in batter, right? Oh, breaded, lovely. With the cranberry sauce, yes, that's fantastic, but no, no ham. And how about a side salad with that..." I felt someone prod me gently with her toe. "Two side salads, extra tomato on one, dressing on the side. Ooh, and do you have any of those little flakey custard pastries with the dash of nutmeg that you serve at breakfast? Oh one of those - no, two of those - and another bottle of your best Chablis."

Merry disappeared off to the bathroom to wash off her makeup, out of temptation's way, as I sat and waited for the food to arrive. I tipped the waiter and spread it out across the coffee table, ready to tuck in. A few minutes later, Merry tip-toed back into the room, fresh-faced and wrapped in a huge, fluffy dressing gown. As she picked up her virtuous salad and started to munch it, she watched me like a cat as I smacked my lips over my baked camembert and my granary bread.

"That looks really melty in the middle..." she observed carefully as I wound a long tendril of melted cheese onto my fork.

"Mmm-hmmm," I replied, mouth full of cheese.

"And does it have those little crispy almost-burned bits on the outside?"

"So crispy," I agreed, and pushed the plate gently towards her, holding out the fork for her to try. Of course, she ate nearly half of it, with a good sized hunk of my granary loaf, and wolfed down not just her salad, but most of mine, too. And then to top it off, she ate one of my custard tarts, knocked back with a glass of my Chablis.

But it did me good to see her smiling and rubbing her full tummy, though she groaned and pretended to loosen the belt of her robe. "Oh my god, I can't believe I ate so much. I am not going to fit into that new dress they gave me," she moaned pitifully.

I shook my head and rolled my eyes. "Well, you could get some quick exercise, that'd burn it off."

"What kind of exercise is going to burn that lot off."

My eyes glinted as I leaned towards her, stroking my beard. "I dunno. You could, uh, come over here and bounce up and down on my face for a while?"

She let out a great, bawdy peel of laughter, then slowly shuffled her way over towards me, climbing on top of me and peeling me out of my new suit before finally delivering on the promise of those salacious glares of the afternoon.


	33. Mile High Club

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After three years of solid work, Daniel and Merry finally get to enjoy a romantic week in Paris.
> 
> Merry is becoming a bit adventurous, starting to enjoy the illicit thrill of semi-public sex. And Daniel is discovering the righteous joys of Feminism.

With our rock star duties over, "Francoise" and "Pierre Thibault" had the rest of the week to ourselves. "Francoise" dragged me out, forced me to leave our suite and go shopping and do cultural things, though really I would have been perfectly happy to stay in bed, just holding her and stroking her hair, oh, and shagging her senseless for the whole weekend. But she wanted an actual _holiday_ , and I quickly had to admit, that after 3 solid years of work, it did me good to be forced into one.

We wandered arm in arm through the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, gazing at symbolist sculptures or cubist paintings until our eyes seemed to go square. I had somehow forgotten, just how much Merry knew about art, how she drank it in, enthused about it, lost herself in surrender, gazing at beautiful pictures, absolutely swept away by the emotion of a piece. Standing in front of Rodin's Gates of Hell, as she explained the symbolism of the figures, I was pulled suddenly back in time, lost in a memory, remembering two young kids on their first date at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I loved the way her eyes lit up, the way she gesticulated madly, the passion and depth of her knowledge. I mean, she got more excited talking about sculpture than I had seen her get excited about a record in a long, long time.

"What are you doing?" she said, playfully grabbing me by the chin and pushing my face aside as she realised I was gazing at her, not the sculpture. "Look at the art, not me. When are you going to get another chance to see a Rodin close up like this?"

"You're amazing," I told her, though I did as I was instructed, and turned back to the art, trying to see it through her eyes.

She bought postcards and sent one to everyone we knew, writing them out in the cafe where we ate lunch, signing our fake names, asking even for Dieter and Doyle's address. I contented myself with buying a couple of art prints for the loft, though god only knew when I'd have time to get them framed. We took the Metro out to a flea market the size of an entire New York block, searching for vintage clothes and records. She was still the consummate crate-digger, with her special system for flipping through the vinyl. We found a couple of rare Jacque Brel and Francoise Hardy records that she insisted we buy, even though they were ridiculously expensive, just for the thrill of buying them in _Paris_.

One morning, we climbed Montmartre and tried to have a picnic on the steps of the church before being chased off by aggressive pigeons. Merry loved Montmartre best, the steep, winding streets, the higgledy-piggledy, old-fashioned shops, the way that shopkeepers bouncily called out "Bonjour!" at the tinkle of every shop bell. I was a bit shy, hanging back, but she played her 'Madame Thibault' character to the hilt, and heartily called "Bonjour!" right back at them, exclaiming and oohing and ahing over beaded jewellery or that heavy North African hippie silver she loved so much. But she bought me a ring with a slice of smoky onyx on it, which I got in the habit of wearing, to remind me of Paris, and remind me of her. I mean, in my head, maybe that ring had symbolism she didn't intend, but I treasured it.

With my Serious Beard, I was mistaken for a local once or twice while strolling round the Left Bank, and had to give directions the Sorbonne in halting schoolboy French, which made Merry laugh. (Not that her French was _that_ much better than mine, she just had less shame about using it, while I hung back, afraid of making mistakes. But somehow we managed between the two of us.) We relaxed into the city's mood, and even started to joke about how maybe we should retire to some romantic artist's garret, up in the rooftops of Montmartre. (Well, at least we did until we peered in the windows of some estate agents, and realised that Paris's nosebleed property prices made the Lower East Side's property boom look affordable by comparison.)

We did all the touristy things. I even booked tickets to the opera, and we dressed up in our best clothes before sitting through the most excruciatingly strange Japanese opera, though Merry insisted it was wonderful. To her, the evening was totally worth it just to wander through the rococo fantasy of the opera house. Architecture really did seem make her horny in that case, as she wandered around in a daze, staring up at the detailing before trying to drag me off into dark corners for a snog, until I laughed and suggested maybe we should just go back to the hotel.

Not that I didn't feel we got enough sex. We frolicked in bed, late in the morning until we found ourselves missing breakfast, only making it down to the dining room just in time to snatch croissants before the food was cleared away. It was true, there was just something in the air of Paris that inspired us to just sit in parks, holding hands, mooning over one another and snogging. A man with an old fashioned polaroid came over and offered to take our photo for five euros, and we bought two different poses, and swapped them, Merry taking the one where we sat demurely together with my arm around her shoulders, and me taking the one where we were giggling over a shared ice cream cone. I mean, wasn't that just typical? That whole expensive photo shoot we'd just done with Dior, but it was the ten-euro snapshots that ended up in both our wallets as souvenirs.

And of course, we window-shopped on the Champs Elysees, strolling hand in hand down the avenue. For a moment, we paused outside the giant Fnac, and I was almost tempted to go in, spotting a large display of _Semantics_ posters, and itching to see how the album was selling... Merry pulled a face, and I could see she wasn't into it, but I really was torn, just for that one moment. But then, across the shop, I saw a young, indie-looking man with a mop of shaggy hair clock us, a brief expression of disbelief crossing his face as he tried to work out if we were really us. And I saw how it would be, the two of us cornered, having to sign autographs and pose for photos, and I looked at Merry, and I just thought _no_. And so I took her swiftly by the hand, and pulled her on, until we were both lost, far from view, in the thronging crowds.

Merry was right; this was our holiday. Just for the two of us, Madame et Monsieur Thibault, away from the vast marketing machines behind Metropolis and Deltawave. It felt like a rare luxury to be anonymous again. We could have been any of hundreds of stylish Parisian couples wandering up and down the boulevards and peering in the shop windows.

The photographer called a few days after the shoot, and invited us to go round his studio and have a look at the contact prints. I made a face, because really, I was enjoying having Merry to myself, without having to work. But Merry raised her eyebrow at me meaningfully, holding her hand over the receiver. "That must mean he really liked us. It's a courtesy, a huge honour in fact - I don't have creative control written into my contracts."

"Alright," I grumbled, and rolled out of bed to put on my new suit. Already, it had become like a second skin to me. I wondered if it would be pushing my luck to ask for a mates' rates discount on a couple more, a shiny black one, and maybe a pale dove grey one.

Merry and I climbed the steep stairs to the photographer's studio, both of us giggling and trying to pinch the other in the bum as we passed one another, puffing, on the stairs. Then we smoothed ourselves down and knocked on the door. The photographer, Charles, greeted us like old friends, kisses on both cheeks, and an offer of glasses of wine before we sat down to work.

Then he guided us through into the studio, and I don't know what I'd been expecting, a light table strewn with negatives and drying prints hanging everywhere, but instead there was a huge Mac with a flatscreen monitor on an expansive desk.

Charles went through the photos of Merry first, some in lush colour, some in gorgeous, pristine black and white, the contrast boosted to make that smokey underground club seem like a treasure cave. I kept my mouth mostly shut as Merry and Charles discussed the clothes, discussed the poses, the lighting, the contrast, because I knew that it was the Dior dresses they were trying to sell with these photos, and I didn't really have any opinion other than hot damn, my girlfriend was so gorgeous she could make a burlap sack look like a Dior ballgown. Then again, the photographs made us both look gorgeous and glamourous. I had felt a bit like an accessory at the time, but really, as Merry danced around me, we both just looked so flushed, so happy, so in love that it was impossible not to envy both of us at little bit. Yes, the photos were very, very sexy, but both of us just looked like we were having so much fun.

After Charles and Merry were done agreeing on the parade of fabulous dresses in which really, I was mostly just a besuited squire in the background, he poured us all another glass of wine then loaded up the next file.

"The decision was not even close on this one. It was completely obvious from the moment I snapped the photo, which one was going to end up representing Dior Homme. I've already sent a copy over to Hedi, he absolutely loves it." And then he clicked the file, and the photo filled the Mac's screen.

The photo that would represent Dior Homme for the next year, that would make the designer's name, that would cause controversy across France and be banned in parts of the States. Sure, the clothes looked beautiful, the suit made me look slender and louche and sexy as fuck. But Jesus, was that really how I wanted my _relationship_ represented? Me standing, legs apart, back arched, hips thrust forward like I was dancing, my cock somehow _more_ obscene for being slightly airbrushed out, staring down at Merry through eyes half-closed with pleasure, with that look of intense intimacy, while Merry, crouched at my feet like a lioness, clinging to my thigh, glared out at the photographer with such an expression of lust and possession and jouissance that she actually looked like she wanted to _eat_ me. I mean, hot damn, that photo made _me_ want to buy a sex, drugs and rock'n'roll Dior Homme suit to get that lifestyle, and I was the one fucking wearing the thing!

"Wow," said Merry, grinning and raising her eyebrows as she turned to me. I could tell already that she loved the photo, but she was waiting for my reaction.

"Wow," agreed Charles. "Hedi was looking for a wow factor, and I think we all agree, this photo has exactly that wow factor. Don't you think, Daniel?" He pronounced my name in the French fashion, _Dan-ee-yale_ , but that somehow only intensified my discomfort.

I pulled back slightly, trying to move my girlfriend away from the photographer, so we could have a semblance of a private conversation. "It is a beautiful photograph, but seriously... Merry, are you sure?"

Merry knew me so well I couldn't even begin to dissemble about the source of my discomfort. She just fixed me with a steely eye and raised one disbelieving eyebrow. "What?" she said firmly. "Danny, what, exactly, is your problem with that photo? Come on, my breasts are angled away from the camera, you can't even see my nipples because I'm pressed up against your leg."

"Come on. I just..." I grasped for words, before hitting on the one thing I knew would convince her. "Merry, come on. That is just... _not_ a particularly feminist photo."

Merry's voice grew so even and cold I knew she was getting really angry at me. "OK, so explain to me, then, what, exactly, is so 'not feminist' about that photo."

"Come on, Merry. A guy in a suit, with a half-naked girl kneeling at his feet, about to do his sexual bidding? Do I really have to explain to you, what is retrograde about that image?"

"Half naked?" Merry snapped. "I'm fully dressed! And what the hell is this _sexual bidding_ bullshit? It's totally obvious, I am seducing you in this photo. Look at our body language, how you are leaning back, your throat exposed, while I am clearly the aggressor, my posture, my hands, the expression on my face, the way I'm looking out at the viewer... I am so obviously the agent of my own sexuality there. And that's what scares the hell out of you, isn't it? An image of a woman being assertive, even aggressive in her sexuality."

"Come on, give me more credit than that," I protested. "I have always been _fine_ with you taking the assertive, even... um, aggressive role in our relationship, sexually or otherwise. But that photo does not look like you being sexually assertive. It looks like... well, it looks like you giving me a blow job!"

Merry blinked with disbelief. "Do you think that I don't _enjoy_ sucking your cock?"

"Well..." I stuttered, feeling like she was about to back me into a corner. "I think you do, genuinely, enjoy watching me receive pleasure."

"Did you know, there are more nerve endings in the mouth than anywhere else on the human body - including the vagina? Are you going to try to tell me that sucking on things is not an inherently pleasurable activity? Do you not enjoy sucking on my tits, or sucking at my clit?"

"I... wow... I..." I felt myself flushing all the way to the roots of my hair, suddenly very aware that there was another man in the room, who seemed to be smirking with titillation at our conversation. "Wow, no, I enjoy those activities very much, trust me, I enjoy them." My mind flashed suddenly back to another evening in our hotel room, Merry straddling me with abandon, my face clamped between her thighs, and me fastening onto her clit and sucking for all I was worth. Yes, it had been her orgasm that had probably disturbed our neighbours, but she was right, sucking her off, latching my tongue and lips onto her pussy, that had been an inherently pleasurable experience for me, so pleasurable that I was getting hard again just thinking about it.

Mercifully, she took pity on my beetroot face, and moved back to the Mac, tracing her fingers across the image, carefully explaining "Look, it is a very sexual image. But it is that rare thing, an image of sexuality that is not demeaning to the woman involved. How can you say that's not a feminist image? Me expressing my sexuality, my desires? If it were you with your head in my lap and your mouth open, would you consider that demeaning to you?"

"No, but I might find it demeaning to _you_ , if, well... it depends!"

"Only if you think sex is inherently demeaning to women," Merry snapped, her eyes flashing.

"No, I don't. But these images do not exist in a vacuum, come on, you're always ranting about images in advertising, on the street, that use women's bodies to sell products. I saw you ranting at a sexy Orangina ad on a bus shelter the other morning..."

"Yes, you're right! I am constantly having to explain to you how to read images, explaining sculptures in galleries and adverts on bus stops! Can you just accept that I do know how to read an image, and make up my own mind whether it's sexist or not? That I have somewhat more experience in this than you do?"

I don't know why that made me so angry, but it did. I hated it when she treated me like an idiot, just because I was a man. "And you're lecturing me on what images mean, really, do I have to remind you that I went to art school, I did whole _courses_ in semiotics and how to read images, and you didn't?"

Merry faced up against me and snapped "That's right, you went to NYU, Mister _Philosophy_ Major, and you went to a couple of seminars on Feminism, that makes you the expert. As opposed to the actual fabric of the lived experiences of my _life_..."

"Guys, guys." Realising that the argument was turning from a friendly squabble to a genuine full-blown marital, Charles finally stepped between us. "I walk a fine line with my photographs all the time, erotic or pornographic, what is the difference. And on these matters, I always defer to the expert: I ask my wife. My wife, she says, this photo, it is very erotic, but it is playful, it is fun, she says the expression on the woman's face makes it plain who is in charge. It is sexy, but it is not sexist. I trust my wife on these matters." He said this with a faint bow towards Merry, who looked faintly triumphant.

I had one last card to play, so I laid it down very carefully. "Merry, just think for a second. How is this really different from the Rolling Stone thing?"

Merry let out a huge, exasperated sigh, and I swear, if she looked like she wanted to eat me in the photo, she looked like she wanted to _kill_ me right now. "You really don't get it, do you?" But then the anger drained out of her voice, and it was that tired, exhausted 'no no no no no' tone that really frightened me. "Danny, does the word consent mean anything to you?"

"I know what the word consent means. We both signed a consent form before we came here. And Rolling Stone made you sign one... when you were plastered. So I really kinda don't trust this nominal notion of..."

"That's right. I was plastered for the Rolling Stone images. I would not have consented to those photos if I hadn't been whacked out on codeine and Californian Merlot. That was the issue with those photos, the diminished capacity for consent, not the whole... _naked_ thing. Like you consented to the KROQ photos, that was the difference. You agreed to do it, with a specific goal in mind."

"And those photos backfired on us, they ended up all over the internet," I reminded her. "I didn't consent to my naked chest ending up somewhere my _sister_ could see it!"

"I consent to this photo. I was aware of what I was doing when we shot it, and I am aware, right now, as I'm looking at it, that I love this photo. I feel like this photo represents all of the ways that I feel about desire, that I feel about my sexuality, that I feel about... that I feel about you, Danny."

That hit me square in the chest, like, suddenly realising that even in the middle of a knock-down argument, she was still crazy about me.

"I want you to consent to these photos, because I want you to consent to me, to all of me; messy, complicated me, and all of my contradictions."

I looked at the photo again, and took a deep breath. It was a beautiful photo. Everything about it - the lighting, the pose, the clothes - was gorgeous, the kind of thing I could imagine blown up on Freshman dorm walls the way The Kiss had been when I was at school. If it had been any other couple, I would have said, y'know, hot damn, those kids are obviously really into each other, that's totally hot. Why was it so different because it was Merry - or because it was me? Was it really because I didn't want people thinking sexual things about Merry, or was it because I was uncomfortable with being portrayed so... well, _hot_? I didn't feel like the guy in that photo, though that was clearly who I was trying to play onstage. Was that really how Merry saw me?

I closed my eyes and thought about it for a minute. Then, finally, I nodded. "OK. But only because you want it so badly."

Merry let out a little cry of triumph and threw her arms around my neck. As she kissed me gently on the cheek, I forgot I was angry at her, and found my arms going around her waist almost by habit.

"Oh, that reminds me," announced Charles, and disappeared off to dig in a cupboard as Merry and I settled our differences with a quick spot of canoodling. "You asked me for a print, so I took the liberty of doing you a poster."

The pair of us turned as he spread it across the desk. There, in pristine black and white, were Merry and I sat at a table playing cards. As I had leaned forward to play my hand, gazing up at her with that _I've won_ smirk of triumph, she had leaned back, resting her elbow behind her so that her suit jacket fell open, revealing her perfect breasts. The effect was breathtaking, but that was definitely pornographic. "Next Metropolis album cover," I quipped.

"No way," Merry laughed. "Next Deltawave single."

"Elisha would have an actual kitten. A purple kitten. With pink spots."

"Haha oh my god, you're right. We'll just get it framed and put it over our bed."

"What about when your Mum comes round?"

"My Mum, believe it or not, has seen my tits before," she laughed.

"When!"

"Skinny dipping, up at the mountain lakes in Vermont." She shrugged as if this were the most obvious thing in the world, and I gawped, trying to imagine the conservative art professor skinny dipping with her daughter in a mountain lake.

"You know," ventured Charles. "This would make an excellent art print. We could have a few hundred copies printed up, signed and numbered. Make a tidy packet, which I'd split with you 50/50..."

Merry fixed him with a steady gaze. "Sorry, but... _no_." Her voice was quite firm, and from the expression in her eye, I could tell she would brook no opposition. Now why the blow job photo was OK, but the topless photo was not for sale, that I could never tell you, but I had long given up trying to penetrate Merry's logic.

Charles, luckily, took it with aplomb, turning to me and shrugging that effortless Gallic shrug. "La femme," he said, with an air of resignation and mystery, and for once, you know, I just agreed with him. He dug on his desk for a card, and presented it to Merry. "My private phone number. If you ever change your mind, or indeed... if you ever wanted to do a private shoot... of a more... _adult_ nature, don't hesitate to give me a call."

Merry had just pocketed the card casually and kissed him goodbye, on both cheeks of course, but in the cab home, she took out the card, stared at it, and started to giggle. I knew what she was thinking, it was what we were both thinking.

"Come on, you can't be serious," I told her.

"No way," she said, quickly enough that I was relieved. But a few minutes later, her face had still not relaxed that curious, excited look. "You've never thought about it, though?"

"Thought about what? Doing porn? No fucking way!"

"Not porn. Erotica," Merry contradicted, and you know, even after that argument back in the studio, I still wasn't entirely sure where the difference lay. "Like, you're not curious what we look like, when we...? You don't think it might be hot?"

I tapped the poster roll thoughtfully against my chin. I was actually more torn than I would ever admit to my girlfriend, but that was a door I did not want to open, because who knew what might lurk on the other side. "No. I see all of you I need to, with my own eyes. I think we should keep _us_ , to ourselves."

 

\----------

 

The last day we were in Paris, sitting in that cafe with the fairy-lights that we had come to think of as ours, eating our last meal and sipping our last bottle of wine, Merry looked suddenly so tragic that I reached out and took her hand, squeezing it gently. "What is it? What did I say now?"

"You didn't say anything, don't worry." She flicked my nose lightly. "I was just thinking, how sad it was, tomorrow we have to leave fairytale Paris and go back to the real world."

"The real world," I laughed. "I'd hardly call going back off to tour with our rock bands a terrible life choice."

"You know what I mean."

"No, I don't know what you mean. Would you rather I was languishing in an accounting office. Would you rather you were still a... _waitress_." I had so nearly said stripper, but she knew what I meant and pulled a face.

"Sometimes maybe I do. I'd see you more often."

"And we'd hate each other. Maybe we keep the magic fresh because we see each other so rarely that every time we do, it's never anything but a treat." I didn't realise until I said it that I might actually believe it. That if we did live an ordinary life, married to one another like an ordinary couple, with the three ordinary children we might have conceived by now, that we might both resent one another for it. 

But Merry's face was stony, as if her thoughts had followed mine to exactly that conclusion. "Is that it? Do you only love me because you don't ever have to live with me, and spend more than a weekend at a time picking my damp clothes off the bathroom floor?"

I just rolled my eyes. Merry's slovenly ways were something I'd just got used to over the years. "Don't be silly. I put up with the clothes on the floor for the same reason I put up with the months apart - because I love you." Pulling her close, I kissed her forehead. "Come on, getting back on the road will be fun. I'm looking forward to it. The band is sounding better than we have in years."

Merry looked like she was going to cry. "I'm not looking forward to it, OK? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bum you out. Please can we not have a fight on our last night? We always do this, and I don't want to do it this time. Paris has been too magical to fight. Let's not spoil the magic and the romance and the fun."

"I'm not fighting with you," I assured her, pouring the last of the wine into her glass, then pushed it towards her. "Is Elisha so unbearable?"

"We've had to cut back on the tour. Some of the dates have been cancelled due to poor ticket sales, and others have been moved to smaller venues. Of course, this is _my_ fault, because I got ill, and we had to stay on in Australia instead of going back to the States to bolster our record."

"You've got to be joking! That's absurd."

"I said we shouldn't go to Australia, I told you that whole continent is bad luck. Nowhere that has that many poisonous creatures that can kill you can possibly be any good."

"Oh, don't say that, we're headed there later this year."

"I'm sure _you'll_ be fine. I've never seen you get so much as a cold."

"And I'm sure your tour will be fine. Once you get playing in the States again, sales and radio will pick up again, I'm sure of it," I told her, pulling her chair closer to mine so I could put my arm around her and rub her shoulder gently.

"I don't know about that. We need another movie tie-in. Or another really big name tour support..."

"You know, we are going back on tour of America once the festival season is over..." I offered, a plan starting to formulate in my head.

She shook her head quickly. "You know I'd love that, but Elisha would never stand to be a support act on your tour, don't be ridiculous."

"I meant as co-headliners." The idea of Deltawave supporting us, it was so absurd I couldn't believe she'd even considered it.

Another head shake. "Michael wouldn't allow it. And I'd be surprised if Taylor would go for it. You guys are on your way up, we're on our way down. Why would you want to be tied to a failing act?"

"Don't be morbid. Windlass have a lot of faith in you. I know it's not misplaced."

"I don't even know if it would be enough. No offence, but we don't exactly have the same audience. We need something a lot bigger, with more of a edge to it. Something like..." And then her voice trailed off, and I knew that she had read the email from Taylor confirming the gig over my shoulder that morning.

"Something like supporting The Curse in Hyde Park this summer." I still couldn't quite believe it was true, second on the bill at a 60,000 person festival.

She changed the subject deftly. "Look, let's go back the hotel. I'm starting to get cold."

"Here," I offered, removing my jacket and draping it around her shoulders. She looked so cute in my clothes, the fitted suit jacket hanging off her like a short cloak. Waving my hand for the waiter, I settled the bill, and we headed off.

We flew back to the States later that evening, holding hands as the plane took off, giggling and joking about joining the mile high club, though when I saw the state of the bathrooms, I decided against it. Still, she couldn't resist slipping her hand under my blanket and resting it on my stiffening cock once the lights went down. "I could give you a quick handjob," she suggested with a wink.

"You're incorrigible," I hissed, looking around to see where the flight attendants had got to, but they were all off, hidden behind the galley curtain. The flight was not very full, and we were sitting towards the back of the plane.

"Yeah, and you daw me for it," she giggled, pulling down my flies and slipping her hand into the gap, pulling out my cock and handling me expertly.

I lay back, gasping for breath. Half of me was terrified, the other half completely aroused and turned on and focused on the soft pressure of her callused, bass-playing left hand on my cock. Come on, after all that banging in a hotel room in Paris, she really couldn't keep her hands off me one last time? Actually, that idea really turned me on, and I felt my cock throb beneath her fingertips, like I still found it a surprise, just how much Merry was _into_ me. Focusing my eyes on her face in the half dark, I felt myself building slowly to a climax, then, with a wicked smile, she bent over as if she was going to pick something off the floor, and swallowed me into her mouth. That was it; I could no longer hold back. Putting my hand gently on the back of her neck, I held her there until I spasmed and came, explosively, into her waiting mouth. And she just sat up, cool as a cucumber, smirking at me as she produced a serviette and patted her mouth dry. Over three years, and she could still astonish me, and knock me off my feet.

But wouldn't you know it, a week later - still promoting _Bee-Sting_ \- we were doing a guest spot on a rather saucy late night session of Dane Dash's MTV video request show, which Dieter was doing his best to drag down into the gutter with his innuendoes towards attractive members of the audience. A pretty young woman in a Metropolis t-shirt stood up, said she worked as a flight attendant, and asked if any members of the band were members of the Mile High Club.

Dieter licked his lips and leaned forward, caressing his mic with rather too much zest. "Not yet, my darling, but if you'd like to book a quick intercontinental jaunt, I'm sure we can sort something out," he drawled, eyeing her from under long, dark eyelashes.

"Really? You haven't?" Doyle seemed surprised.

"Why? Have you?" Dieter accused, turning to him, but Doyle backed down, shaking his head quickly.

I don't know what came over me, maybe it was finally a hint of irritation at the way that Dieter and Doyle were considered the reigning sex symbols of the band. But slowly, sheepishly, I raised my hand.

"Hang on, boys," ventured Dane Dash, the muscle-headed host, as Dieter and Doyle exchanged looks like a pair of sparring rams. "I think we've got another answer in the band." And all of them turned to stare at me, as I blushed with mingled pride and embarrassment.

"Daniel?" exclaimed Doyle, and the surprised tone was not exactly encouraging.

"Late night flight back from Paris with my girlfriend. The City of Romance. It happens," I confessed.

"Yeah, and I'm not surprised. We all know what Dan's girlfriend looks like. Merry's stunning; she models for Firbank," Doyle blurted out, with a candidness that shocked us both.

"Next question," I stuttered, feeling even the tips of my ears go red, as I noticed several female members of the audience looking at me in a new light. Ever since that Dior photo had been published, women had started looking at me in a new way, in a curious way like, I dunno, is this really the same guy?

"Dude!" blustered Dane Dash, moving towards me and crossing his arms over his chest. He was nearly a foot taller than me, and his biceps so bulged with muscles that they were thicker than my thighs. "Like, what do you even lift?"

"Excuse me?" I stuttered.

"What do you lift? I can bench press a hundred pounds."

"I can... I dunno. I can lift my Epiphone Casino, which is all I ever need to lift in my job," I shrugged, raising my hands, palm up, to show my sinewy toothpick arms. Some of the girls in the front row laughed and clapped.

"I bet you don't even weigh a hundred pounds. I could probably bench press you!" Dane Dash turned to the audience and flexed, playing for laughs. "Little scrawny guy like this, and he's banging a Firbank model. Can you believe it?"

I bristled, suddenly feeling like this ape was trying to humiliate me for the audacity of having an attractive girlfriend. "Merry says I'm lithe. Wiry, even. Some girls like that. My girlfriend just happens to be one of them." The girl who had originally asked the mile high question, the pretty one in the Metropolis T-shirt, she nodded and then whooped, still eyeing Dieter. The girl next to her elbowed her, then clapped and raised her arms over her head in agreement.

"And what about Karen Litchen?" whispered Doyle, too low for the microphone to pick up, but loud enough for me to hear. "Does _she_ think you're lithe?" Like, come on, he could not still be sore about that?

"Shut up! Karen Litchen is friends with my sister, OK?" I hissed back, my hand over my mic.

Dane Dash shook his head, clearly irritated at the attention the girls were giving us. The camera cut away from us, as the screens flashed up a close-up of that Dior Homme advert, Merry on her knees at my feet, both of us looking like we were gagging for it. "Holy cow, this puny little twerp really is banging a Firbank model." Disbelief was starting to curdle to admiration in Dane's voice. Another picture flashed up, a paparazzi shot of Merry and I outside the Irving Plaza record release party. I tried to keep from grinning, caught between embarrassment at my private life splayed out on the camera like that, and pride in my magnificent girlfriend. She always made me look amazing in photos, the way that she made lifeless designer clothes look good. But now the cameras were back on Dane. "So maybe you Metropolis guys, you can give the rest of us lessons on how to pick up girls, like... tell us. What you have to do to win a date with a Firbank model." His voice was so sarcastic I didn't even want to reply, but I could feel my face flushing, and I knew I was probably turning red under the back of my collar.

"Well, for a start, you can stop referring to them as 'Firbank models', because they are women, and as women, they are _people_ , they are human beings, not prizes you earn for bench-pressing the most... dumbbells." Doyle and Dick both turned towards me, surprised by my outburst, but I was actually angry now, and not prepared to stop. "And furthermore, if you want to know how to have success with women... try _talking_ to them. As if women were actual human beings with ideas and interests of their own. Because that is how a skinny little schmuck like me got to date a goddess like Merry. I talked with her, about art and music and films and yes, even fashion, and I asked her what she liked, and found out what we had in common, and then, believe it or not, little scrawny guy that I am... she asked _me_ out."

My voice ended up being drowned out by the whooping and hollering and clapping from the female half of the audience. Whatever I had just said, it had clearly struck a chord, as even Doyle leaned over and slapped me on the back. As the cameras panned the audience, and Dane Dash tried to re-establish order on the set, the girl in the Metropolis t-shirt scribbled something on a piece of paper and dashed up to hand it to Dieter.

In the background, behind the cameras, a light flashed saying 'QUIET ON SET' and the girls finally calmed down. Regaining control over the audience, Dane Dash simmered down, then smiled his smarmy Hollywood smile. "Well, any more questions on the Metropolis lifestyle, or advice for those moments when they're not banging Firbank models on midnight flights back from Paris... or perhaps someone has a request...?"

"I have a request," I piped up again, feeling it was now or never. "How about the new single from Deltawave?"

"Deltawave... I think we can do that," Dane Dash agreed, and the camera focused in on his face as he winked. "Here's the new single from Deltawave, and boys... keep your eyes on the skies."

Merry was going to kill me, but it was worth it for the new looks of respect and surprise on Dieter and Doyle's faces. And no, the applause from the girls in the audience, feeling like they were choosing my approach over a gorilla like Dane Dash, that didn't hurt, either. And actually, Merry rang me in fits of giggles a few days later.

"Oh my god, did you really say that? On MTV? Did you tell Dane Dash that you and I were members of the Mile High Club?" she gasped, and I had to assent. "Holy fucking shit. Michael is on the warpath and Elisha is fucking furious, but oh my god, did Dieter and Doyle just lose their shit or what?"

"You should have seen their faces," I beamed, feeling my chest swell with pride. "It was so funny."

"Well, to be honest, if that's what it takes to get us played on MTV again, I don't give a shit," Merry laughed, and I was glad to hear that spark of amusement in her voice again. "We'll have to fly somewhere even more exotic for our next holiday, maybe on a longer flight we can go all the way."

"Spot of mountain climbing in Tibet?"

"India, I'd love to go to India... Somewhere with big scenery and lots of mountains."

"We could just fly to Montana in that case."

"Too short a flight for any serious banging. If I weren't convinced the continent of Australia has a death wish for me, I'd say we should go there."

But in the end, we settled for a week of hill walking in Wales for our next trip, whenever that would end up being - somewhere between the end of summer and the beginning of the autumn tour season, no doubt.

I returned home to the Lower East Side to discover that two of The Stakes had now grown beards, and in fact, half the bands on MTV were rocking Serious Beards. When I saw a 'hot new band' on BuzzBin called something stupid like the Beards Of London, who looked like little more than a bearded boyband dressed up in Metropolis' cast-off suits, I decided I had had enough. Digging through my bathroom cabinet for a forgotten razor, I lathered up and then shaved the Serious Beard, surprised at how young and fresh my face looked underneath.


	34. Life In The Fast Lane

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (This is a rather dense chapter I probably should have split into two, but oh well. It's long, but a lot of stuff happens in here which will reverberate through the rest of the story.)
> 
> Metropolis head back on the road, headlining their own massive tour, before joining The Curse as opening act for truly supermassive stadium shows. Finally, the band seemed poised to make the leap from cult indie act to super-stardom.
> 
> But along the way, things are starting to unravel. Dieter is out of control on cocaine, his personality stretched so thin that he can have an existential melt-down over hair gel, and his sexual (ha-hem) antics are leading to serious trouble. Doyle is sexually frustrated as hell, and headed for a collision. Dick, however, finally falls on his feet, and meets the woman he eventually marry. But Daniel... Daniel has his hands full with the band, while his girlfriend heads for her own disaster, as the papers get hold of _certain photos from Paris_.

When the band reassembled to start the next leg of our tour, I discovered that I was not the only person who had used his newfound celebrity to blag better clothes. True, I now owned three Hedi Slimane suits in varying shades of black and grey. But Dick, why that smooth old dog had only gone and got an endorsement deal with Ozwald Boateng! His shiny silk suits, unlike my severe rock'n'roll monochrome, came in a riot of colour. He had an olive green one he wore with an almost neon lime shirt and canary coloured tie. He had a peacock blue one that came with an aqua shirt and a cobalt tie. And then his favourite was a blood red suit, so bright that I swear it almost glowed back there behind the drum kit. Dieter, not to be outdone, had acquired some super-fetishy gear from Alexander McQueen. He had a black leather vest so form-fitting it was almost a corset, buttoning up the front with a dozen silver buttons that looked suspiciously like the SS skull crest. This was worn with a pair of black pseudo-bondage trousers in a weird parachute-silk material, so tight he had to lie down and hold his breath as he shoehorned himself into them. His silk shirts had developed foppish puffed sleeves that seemed to have expanded with his ego, so that he had to play his bass with exaggerated flourishes, and when not onstage, he had taken to wearing a knee-length velvet frock coat so Gothic the road crew started calling him 'The Count' and making Dracula jokes.

Doyle? Doyle turned up to the tour bus wearing Adidas track suit pants and a faded Motley Crue _Girls, Girls, Girls_ t-shirt. For fucks sake! As soon as we had finished soundcheck at our first venue, I frog-marched him to the nearest department store and forced him into a dress shirt and a pair of formal black pants.

Everything got yet another stage bigger on the next tour. The touring party expanded, as a guitar tech and drum tech joined our road crew, jostling with Simon and Ronnie for seniority. We hired an even bigger bus to fit everyone, as crew were starting to outnumber the band by about three to one. On this tour, to help us fill venues this size with stages the size of airplane hangars, we hired a lighting designer, because we wanted to move from boring washes of coloured light, to a full light show, with screens to show close-ups and projections nicked from our videos, matching the timing and moods of the various tracks. Hot damn, what a long way we'd come from those few red lights we'd used at the Lacuna Lounge. But the fancy lights and videos meant we couldn't vary the setlist much any more, not without consulting half a dozen people. On this kind of scale, everything became more scripted, from the dance moves that I did during my guitar solos, to the brief bursts of stage patter. With a strict load-in and load-out schedule, there could never be a deviation of more than 30 seconds from the schedule, so Doyle's onstage comments, never very garrulous to start with, became more formal and more surreal, repeated night after night until they were totally stripped of any meaning. Jeanette's words about Dead Letters echoed strangely in my head, as I heard Doyle tell the story about _Ugly_ being an excuse for everyone to get ' _wicked_ ' for about the twentieth time.

Now that we were headliners, everybody wanted a piece of the action. Smaller bands were vying for our support slots, and Taylor suggested that we take on a few buy-ons, but I said no to the Beards of London's offer. I still felt a vague proprietary sense towards our fanbase, and in no way was I was being held responsible for putting that nonsense in fans' ears. In the end, we asked along a friend's band, another Lacuna alumnus, recommended by Charlene, and actually fronted by our keyboard player Duncan's little brother, Branwell. Branwell's gimmick was that he had an all-girl backing band, the Belles: a female drummer, a female bass-player and a female keyboard-player. Doyle and Dieter loved the idea, in fact, I think the idea of checking out the talent was half the draw when we went to scope them out at Brownie's. But those chicks, man, they were all brilliant musicians, but they were _tough_. Their drummer, a cute Latina chick who reminded me pleasantly of Jeanette, absolutely demolished Doyle when he tried to pull.

Me, I wasn't interested in pulling. I just remembered the economic realities of being an unsigned band, and the A&R guy in me could not let go of the desire to showcase and help out bands I genuinely loved and believed in. As Branwell's U-Haul pulled up behind our massive tourbus, I felt a wave of nostalgia, but it dissipated quickly when I smelled the back of their van, petrol fumes and a distinct whiff of rotting junk food. A decent tourbus was one of many, many advantages of growing into a much bigger band.

The stages, too, got bigger, the crowds got bigger, the riders got bigger, and all of our egos got bigger. Now that we weren't responsible for looking after anything, now that our gear just appeared onstage, and disappeared again without our having to worry about it, and even our guitars were magically taken off and tuned for us, our lives involved more and more waiting and less and less control over our own environments. Into all that free time, into that godlike vacuum where every one of our whims had a team of people dedicated to making our desires reality, crept an oddly familiar but toxic influence. I was so caught up in other concerns - in managing Tony as he managed our team of roadies and crew, in keeping an eye on Dick to make sure he was OK, in fielding increasingly unhappy emails from Merry - that I did not notice at first how Dieter was spinning out into orbit on cocaine.

Dieter's nightly line of coke after the gig started moving up earlier and earlier. First, he started doing it just before the encore so that it would hit during our triumphant last three songs. Then he started disappearing offstage during the quiet, guitars only ballad three songs from the end, so that it would hit during the last song of the set. The song he skipped out before moved earlier and earlier. He stopped even having to go backstage for his lines, as one of the new roadies just chopped them out for him, just out of sight in the wings. And by halfway through the tour, Dieter needed a line of coke before the gig to get him onstage, another halfway through, and then yet more again to get him through the encore.

Unlike Dick, Dieter never _appeared_ to loose control on coke. He didn't freak out on drugs, partly because he barely drank while using, preferring instead to focus his nervous energy. And what Dieter focused his energy on, was sex. It was bad enough when he had only been competing with Doyle, but now he seemed to feel some weird urge to prove he could go one better than _shagging a Firbank model on a flight back from Paris_. It was way worse than when he'd been sparring with Doyle, like this one wasn't a sport, it was oddly personal.

The fans, on that tour, that was where it started to get weird. I mean, I always did my best, and tried to remember what it was like to be one of those kids waiting outside the backstage door, trying to get a photo, an autograph, a moment of connection with someone whose music meant so much to me. Mostly, I found it humbling, when I opened the backstage door after a 90 minute show and a 2-hour afterparty, and found kids, waiting, outside, in all weather, just wanting a moment with us.

But there were always some that just took it that bit too far. Not the ones that just waited outside the venue before and after the show. The ones that followed you down the street when you popped out to get a newspaper. The ones that hung around trying to look through the windows of your tourbus. The ones who got in their cars and followed your van back to the hotel. The ones who just mysteriously _appeared_ at your hotel without anyone having invited them, like, how the hell did they figure out where we would be? It was starting to be a problem. 

Me, I always tried to humanise the situation. Like, I would talk to people, try to give them what it was they wanted, if it was an autograph or a guitar pick or a photo. Most of the time that was all they wanted, some little token, some proof that we had connected. But there was always that weird line, that you could never quite tell who it was that was going to cross it. People act like it's the girls who are the worst, the ones who are really _sexually_ obsessed. But to me, no, the guys were way scarier, like, the girls at least had their crazy crushes as an outlet for their obsessions, to which you could say "That's super flattering, but no thanks, I've got a girlfriend." The guys, the guys who loved you, but didn't quite know what to do with that love, they were the ones who actually frightened me.

Like, I knew these people had a relationship with our music - a really intense one, from the way I would sometimes see guys in the audience, openly weeping, singing along with every word, even the obscure B-sides. But some of them seemed to translate that relationship with our music, into a relationship with us, as people, and forgot that although they might know everything about us, they were strangers to us. And that was a bit scary, the people who had memorised every song, read every interview, knew everything there was to know about us - and yet treated us in ways that no one would ever dare treat a stranger. Like, y'know, I am not a _big_ guy. I am not really the kind of person who can handle himself in a... physical situation. And some of those people, the ones who stood a little too close, a wild look in their eye, and hugged a little too long - let's not even talk about people who don't even _ask_ before they hug or grab or let off camera flashes in your face - and then just would not back off or respect my personal boundaries when I said I was tired and wanted to just go crash? I'll be honest, there were nights when I'd go get our drum tech Steve, who _is_ a big guy, to walk me to the bus.

Dick, oddly, found it hardest to cope with our pushier fans. Probably because Dick was, by nature, such a friendly, easy-going, trusting kind of guy who just wanted to be friends with everyone. And so he took it the hardest when people were rude, pushy and demanding, and acted like they were _entitled_ to his time and his attention. Dieter, though he probably attracted the most fans simply because he was the most outspoken and the most recognisable, Dieter had no problem being rude to people and telling them to fuck off if they crossed that line. But oddly, the more people he told to fuck off, the more it seemed to increase his appeal, like Dieter's arrogance was half of what people were drawn to. Doyle, however? Doyle refused point blank to handle it at all. He jammed a baseball cap down low over his eyes, kept his eyes on the ground and ploughed through without stopping to talk to anyone.

Doyle, on this tour, seemed completely disinterested in fans, even in groupies. Something about his affair with Auntie Beast had torn the heart out of him. Doyle was going through a phase of wallowing, and part of that wallowing took the almost pathological need to obsess over unattainable girls. He went through a thing for married women, mooning endlessly over the wives of radio DJs, promoters and record company people, guys who could do our careers serious damage if they caught him cuckolding them. But this obsession lasted until the wife of a Windlass executive intimated that she was willing to fool around with him, poolside by a mansion in LA. He was so racked with guilt over giving in to her, that his next obsession was lesbians. Not bisexual girls, or heteroflexible girls that he actually stood a chance with, but proper, full-on butch lesbians who would no more think of shagging Doyle than shagging furniture.

Doyle grew his hair out again, he let it get long and feathery until it almost touched his shoulders and he started to be mistaken for a girl. He fell for a handsome young Butch (her word, not mine!) named Sal in San Francisco, and somehow persuaded her to travel on the bus with him, though I slept above Doyle's bunk, and knew that _she_ never gave in. I didn't get it all at. I mean, Sal looked like a boy. A handsome boy, to be fair, but she totally looked like a bloke. It wasn't until a few weeks in that I realised, coming back from the bathroom and mistaking her in a darkened hall, that with her square jaw and blocky nose, she totally looked like a blonde version of Dieter. That creeped me the fuck out, and once I'd seen it, I could not unsee it.

She and Doyle sat at the back lounge, smoking hard and playing cards, looking almost like twins, him in an un-ironed dress shirt and tie, her in a butch white T-shirt and a leather waistcoat, her blond hair cropped shorter than Dieter's as she took Doyle first for his per diems and then for his cigarettes. Doyle, who had placed on People Magazine's 50 Most Eligible Bachelors in America, and was ignoring the advances of actresses and models across California, was obsessed with Sally, writing lyric poetry full of frustration and yearning. And though I really wanted to smack him and tell him to just knock it off, well, really, the songs we were building around those lyrics were incredibly good. Doyle always wrote best when he was completely frustrated; he seemed to lose his muse if he was getting regular sex.

Dieter, on the other hand, was the diametric opposite of frustrated. Dieter, or so he claimed, as much to justify his behaviour as to explain his current psychological state of mind, was embarking on a systematic experiment with disarrangement of the senses. He started going on to the press about the "Utter and total satiation of my immediate desires" and insisted upon indulging his urges immediately, without question. Every passing whim, every momentary fascination had to be indulged, and most of them were sexual. Where Dieter's sexual mores had been cavalier before, now they verging on suicidal. He fucked girls he knew had boyfriends, sometimes wooing them away from their partners right under their noses, as if it was the challenge he was enjoying, rather than the girl's attention. He boasted to everyone how he had sex in threesomes and even foursomes, and took particular pleasure in persuading straight girls to have sex with each other in front of him, merely for his own titillation, treating the world as his private porno movie. He no longer showed even the slightest bit of loyalty, or even human decency, picking girls up for as long as they amused him, before discarding them, sometimes hundreds of miles from home, as soon as he found a new fascination. Sure, our touring party was now the size of a small village, but it was hard not to notice the steady stream of women coming and going through it. 

And what was worse, no matter how badly Dieter behaved, he seemed to just get away with it. His women, for all their sexual aggression, were oddly passive when it came to never challenging him. I certainly felt like I didn't have the authority to confront him. I felt like I no longer knew who my bandmate was, as if the playful art student I'd known at NYU had completely disappeared under a tidal wave of cocaine and easy blow-jobs.

Late one night, as the six of us, the band plus Sal, were sheltering from the rain in a diner, waiting for the bus to return from refuelling at an out of town gas station that sold diesel, we watched as a car pulled up and parked in an alley opposite. An enormously fat woman got out, and slowly waddled across the street towards the diner, so barely mobile that I felt obliged to turn my eyes away, even as Dieter stared, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets with coke psychosis. The woman walked into the diner, ordered a takeaway of a diet soda and a side portion of french fries, paid for them, then walked out again, nodding at the group as she left.

"Evening, boys. Nice night for it," she acknowledged, and her voice, even I had to admit, was oddly sexy, a deep, rolling contralto with a faint Southern accent, the silky purr of her words a striking contrast to her grotesque appearance.

"That poor woman," Doyle observed as she waddled back across the road and climbed into her car, taking out her dinner and sitting eating it, alone in her car.

"Poor?" asked Sal, always intent on giving Doyle a hard time. "How do you know what her life is like? Maybe she's happy eating her fries in her car, listening to the radio."

"I know what'd make her happy," Dieter drawled slowly, his voice distorted by the coke. It was a good thing that Dieter didn't even do backing vocals, as he was starting to pick up an unattractive vocal fry from the constant nasal backdrip. "I bet I could fuck her."

"Dieter!" I turned to him, shocked speechless. Dieter's horror of fat people was almost legendary, and he'd been known to turn girls out of the dressing room for failing to conform to his rigid standards.

"I bet I could, though. How much do you want to bet?"

Sal let out a squiggle of noise that could have been laughter, or could have been disgust, but Doyle rose to the bait. "OK, buddy, you're on. I bet you twenty bucks you can't fuck that lady."

"We'll see," Dieter announced, standing up, and carefully smoothing down his hair in the mirror over the counter, before striding out into the night. In ten seconds, he had crossed the road and was standing at the side of the fat woman's car, bending over to speak to her through the open window. After a few minutes - and I couldn't even begin to imagine the conversation - the door opened, the woman emerged, and climbed into the back seat of the car. Dieter turned back towards the cafe, held aloft a thumbs up in a grotesque parody of a wink, then climbed into the back seat with her. About five minutes later, as we watched, helpless, unable to tear our eyes away, the car started rocking back and forth with an unmistakable rhythm. I had had a few glasses of wine at the aftershow, but there was no way I was drunk enough to even process what was going on. Sal was giggling, and Duncan the keyboard player was making an odd strangled noise that might have been laughter, but Doyle and Dick just stared in shocked silence. At about ten minutes, the car stopped shaking, then after a brief respite, the back door opened and Dieter emerged, tucking his cock, Prince Albert and all, back into his bondage trousers and pulling them up around his skinny hips before sloping back across the road, and into his seat. "OK, you owe me twenty bucks, Doyle."

Doyle, too astonished to say anything else, pulled out his wallet and paid up, even as our giant tourbus pulled up outside the diner, blocking out any view of what happened to the woman or her car. By the time I had climbed the stairs and looked out the windows of the front lounge, both were gone.

But Dieter was the only one of us who still relished talking to the press, spinning outrageous yarns and lies for horror-struck journalists who ate up every word. I had lost track of the ridiculous things I read about my own band in the press, but the snowballing wave of publicity was something that Dieter seemed to have decided to surf like a wave. Although I was happy to try to steer the questions back to music whenever I was buttonholed by a journalist, Dieter used the press half as a confessional or free therapist, and half as a theatre in which to play out his fantasies. Half the things he told them, bizarre intellectual games, didn't even make sense any more. When I raised my concerns with Taylor, she laughed and said she actually encouraged it. There was no such thing as bad publicity, only mismanaged publicity - remember the whole _Bee-Sting_ / heroin tempest in a teapot? - and she seemed to almost relish feeding outraged denials of Dieter's more absurd statements through Emma and Sandra, playing good cop to his bad cop.

The tour dragged on. There was a point at which it stopped being fun, and started being a job with inconvenient hours, and at that point, I had to pull myself up sharp, and remember why I did it. There were moments, when it all came together: a particularly joyous aftershow in California that was invaded by a group of fans who said they had all met each other through the internet and wanted to thank Metropolis for introducing them; gigs where the whole band just happened to be in the right mood, and the music just lifted us all to a state of transcendence; a rare _good_ interview that was just Doyle and me, where we realised we hadn't talked to each other properly in months, and had a heart to heart about music, and philosophy and life, in front of a shocked but delighted radio DJ. But we kept touring as long as _Semantics_ sold, and as Gerry launched single after single onto KROQ, _Semantics_ sold and sold and sold. As _Bee-Sting_ 's reign at the top of Billboard's Modern Rock chart started to falter, _Nowhere Fast_ took its place. 

 _Nowhere Fast_ was always the live favourite, and man, no matter how big the halls were, and how far back the kids were at the barricades, they fucking tore it up when we played _Nowhere Fast_. It was such fun to play, too, Dick and I locking together in this metronomic, almost ska-inflected beat, the two of us hammering the 2 and 4 as Doyle's fingerpicking skitted across the 1 and 3, the tension building until the four of us all surged together for the straight-ahead disco jam of the chorus, the whole crowd jumping up and down on the balls of their feet, howling along with Doyle as he sang "She's taking me for a ride, going nowhere fast, not built to last., but pretty..."

I tried to remind myself about the power of the music, really forced myself to focus on what we were doing onstage, focusing my attention on every note of every song, instead of letting the music just clear my mind and lift me clear of consciousness. But actually, I couldn't help but notice that I played better when I didn't think about it, when I threw my head back and let go, dancing across my side of the cavernous stages in wild abandon. And anyway, playing music was only an hour and a half out of the twenty-four hours a day of _nothing_ that had to be filled while on tour. It was never being onstage that was the problem with touring - it was everything else. And there was so damn much of _everything else_. It turned the mind, that kind of inactivity and mindlessly repetitive boredom. You had to turn to something to fill that kind of space, whether that something was drugs, or persuading impressionable young women to come along on the bus as a kind of free rolling entertainment, or retreating back to your bunk to compose long and impassioned emails to your absent girlfriend.

Merry kept me sane on that tour, she really did. And I thought about what it was she'd said, way back in the early days when we'd just been getting to know one another, when she'd claimed she "couldn't look after a cat" and actually, it wasn't true. She looked after me without my even noticing she was doing it, checking in with me via email, asking how I was, reminding me to take vitamin tablets and eat more fruit. It was funny how much of my life I spent Being The Organised One in the band, and taking care of everything and everyone else. But Merry was the only person who ever really took the time to take care of me. It was the one thing, I think, that kept me from spinning out of control as my bandmates were doing around me.

Still, things were not great for Merry, though it took some wheedling to pull the story out of her - and I eventually had to get the full details from Sandra, who was more tuned into the British press than I was. Merry was going through her own trial by fire in Comment Is Free, over that Dior Homme advert that she had been so keen to print. One of the Guardian's regular feminist columnists - a Julie someone-or-other - had absolutely gone to town on the advert, calling it a depraved, retrograde male fantasy of female submission and degradation, and used it to advocate for political lesbianism. Well. I happened to know for a fact that Merry had tried lesbianism for exactly one weekend, one summer at a Swedish festival, and found it interesting, but not entirely to her tastes. But though I was pretty chuffed that someone - and a radical feminist, to boot! - had agreed with my assertion that it was not exactly a feminist image, I was actually quite annoyed that this woman had chosen to stridently pile on _me_ as the originator of this sexist abomination. For fucksake, I had been the one trying to get Merry not to publish it!

But Merry, despite my advice - and despite a warning from Michael that was actually quite sensible for a change - emailed the Guardian and got them to publish a riposte to the piece, advocating a woman's right to determine her own sexuality and her own fantasies, without being policed by 'the lesbian Stasi'. And then all hell had broken loose in the comment section of the newspaper's website, which was now online and spewing anger and bile not in my direction, or even Julie B--'s direction, but in Merry's. Seriously, I thought of myself as a pretty worldly guy, but some of the filth that got aired below the line, it made me ashamed to be a man. I mean, I knew that photo was a bad idea, but I didn't think anyone deserved _that_. Especially not Merry, who seemed unable to stop reading the things, obsessively, even compulsively, though I could tell they were actually affecting her quite badly.

The controversy raged for weeks - much to Hedi's delight, of course, because he wanted to be the Sex Pistols of men's fashion - and culminated in the advert being banned in several States. Despite the ad campaign's success in raising Slimane's and Dior's profiles, the backlash against Merry, and Deltawave, hit hard. Of course not everybody was against the advert; Playboy offered Merry half a million dollars to pose in the starkers for them, which absolutely infuriated her, on many levels. (Not least of which that they had offered Karen Litchen a cool million to bare all.) Merry, much like Dieter, didn't know when to let go of a controversy. But unlike Dieter, she did not relish the fight; it absolutely destroyed her to fire off a furious letter to Playboy, defending her right to her own sexuality, even while calling them disgusting neo-libertarian pigs. Playboy retaliated by printing the letter (with, of course, the neo-libertarian insults removed) accompanied by a blown-up photo of Merry, at the Dior shoot, with her breasts hanging out of my Hedi Slimane suit.

Merry hit the fucking roof, and went on the warpath against Charles. In the end, he called me, and swore blind, up and down and on his mother's grave, that he had not sold the photo, and asked me, man to man, had we at any point, let that poster out of our sight? I racked my brains, and remembered the little photographers' shop down on Canal Street where we had got it framed. Of course they turned out to the the source of our leak - and dozens of other women who didn't happen to be celebrities. Merry, Charles, and Dior ganged up and sued them out of existence, (Playboy settled out of court) but it was a hollow victory, as the damage had already been done.

To add insult to injury, Elisha was furious - of course he refused to believe that Merry had not done it herself, for the attention - and the tensions within Deltawave ratcheted up another notch. He actually went on record in a soundbite on NME dot com, saying that he was against modelling, and against fashion, and thought the whole 'attention-seeking schtick was a media circus detracting from the music.' Although he never mentioned Merry by name, it was pretty clear who he intended, and Merry called me in floods of tears.

I tried to support her the best I could, but a thousand miles away, on a tourbus crawling across the Rockies, I felt powerless to do her much good. For most of that tour, I was in a weird, weird place. I was successful, wealthy (the roaring chart success of _Semantics_ meant that _Lights! Camera! Action!_ had started selling again, and our debut album was certified Gold only a few months after our second) and should have been on top of the world, but if this was what success was like, well, success felt pretty overrated right at that point.

There was week-long period, as the tour bus crawled across Western Canada - where Doyle had had his passport and wallet stolen by some junkies in Vancouver, along with his favourite Les Paul - that even Dieter lost interest in hedonism as a way of filling the gaps. Draping his body right across the back seat of the rear lounge, so that no one else could sit down next to him, he sulked and read his way slowly through a massive doorstep of a book about post-structuralist linguistics and semiotics.

"Did you know?" drawled Dieter, as I sat squished into the seat opposite him, trying to concentrate on my Gide novel, but really thinking only of the next time we'd be in a city with an internet cafe, so that I could try to check in with Merry. "Did you know that the Welsh language has an actual word whose closest English translation is, ' _The Longing To Be Back In Wales_ '?"

Closing my book, I looked down at Dieter, lying on his side with his knees curled up and his head balanced in one hand, twisting his hair up into jagged spikes. This was the Dieter that I liked best, the interesting, intellectually curious man I'd known back at art school. "Well, let's hear it?"

"Hiraeth," Dieter read aloud, thoughtfully. "Homesickness, tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. It is a mix of longing, yearning, wistfulness, and an earnest desire for the Wales of the deep past." He looked up at me, his black eyes sparkling, or maybe he was on the edge of tears. "What an astonishing word. It seems to be the permanent condition when one is touring, longing to be back in a home which no longer exists. And all of the whoring, the drugs, the endless pursuit of hedonistic oblivion, it's powerless against this sensation of _Hiraeth_. I have never heard such a perfect encapsulation of the musician's condition."

"Is there an Algonquin word which means _the longing to be back in New York_? Coz that's what I got," I sighed.

Closing his book and slipping it onto the table, Dieter lay back against the padded seat, his arms folded behind his head, staring up into space. And I was struck with the impression that if I didn't know who Dieter was any more, well, neither did he. For a long moment, I was seized with the sudden urge to reach out to him, to just say, 'Hey, you seem kinda out of sorts lately. What's going on with you? We never talk any more. Do you want to just grab a beer and reminisce about our college days?'

But before I could speak, Doyle came bumbling into the lounge with the grace of a baby elephant, with Sal tagging behind him. "Dan, old man, it's pretty fucking obvious that what you are suffering from is the _Longing To Be Back Inside Merry_. You need to call your girl and get laid!"

And the moment passed, Dieter unfolding himself from the back seat and walking over to the VCR to snap on the tape of Anal Virgin Whores, Volume 3, the only thing he knew would infallibly work to drive Sal, and thus Doyle, from the back lounge. I gave up on all of them and picked up the Gide novel I had been trying to finish for the past year, retreating back to my bunk to read.

Then, in Canada, the unthinkable happened. Dick pulled. Before our Toronto show, an attractive young woman with bobbed dark hair and a huge camera approached us at soundcheck and asked if she could get a photo pass, as she had not heard back from Emma or Sandra at our publicist's office.

"Sure thing," said Doyle, and sloped off to find Tony.

Dieter was staring at her, as if trying to evaluate what his urges were, but Dick spoke first. "Excuse me, ma'am, but is that a Texan accent I detect?"

"Sure is. Fort Worth born and bred," she told him as she flashed an unexpectedly marvellous smile. She really was stunningly pretty in a little-girl-lost kinda way when she smiled, her whole face lighting up like her cornflower blue eyes.

"I'm from Dallas," Dick told her, as a homesick expression drifted through his eyes.

She brightened, extending her hand graciously. "Why, we're practically neighbours. I'm Clara."

"Ricardo... but everyone calls me Dick. They got kind of a thing for the letter D, these guys."

As soon as Dick seemed to express an interest, picking up her hand and brushing his lips across her knuckles, making her giggle like a little girl, Dieter sprung into action. "A cowgirl, are you? So... can I buy you a drink?"

"I don't drink," Clara told him icily.

"Are you a friend of Bill?" Dick asked hopefully, as if barely believing what he was hearing.

Clara gave him a long, even stare. "Yessir. Two and a half years sober, and not a day I'm not grateful for it."

"Six months, and still finding it harder than a dry lake in July," Dick confessed.

"One day at a time," Clara said quietly. "Just take it one day at a time. Trust the process... No, wait. I'm not going to lie to you. The process is 9/10s bullshit. But it's the people, the people you meet along the way that make it work. Hang in there, Ricardo. It _is_ worth it." And the pair of them looked into each others' eyes and were lost. The next day, she was on the bus with us out to Montreal, officially as 'tour photographer'; but unofficially, she never left the bus again. I could have put a wager on it - that Clara and Dick would be married within the year. She started working on her first photobook, a documentary of that insane Metropolis tour where the band really started to take off but we started to come apart, as people.

Clara took scores of moody black and white photos of our performances, pristine, iconic and archive-ready, followed by warm, colour, human photos of the group offstage. The photo-book would turn out to be a snapshot of our whole year: Dieter with an ever changing parade of anonymous young women with hands raised to shield their eyes or their faces turned away; a puffy-faced Doyle mooning over Sal, sitting in the back lounge hugging her knees, looking like spooky twins, a pair of young James Deans; Dick looking happier than he'd ever looked in his life, plain white t-shirt rolled up to reveal both arms covered in full tattooed rockabilly sleeves, gazing up into his future wife's eyes with open devotion; and me, usually alone, on the phone, or plugged into my laptop, but once or twice, when she could Peter-Book a day or two off her own tour, with Merry sitting next to me, both of our faces shining with the pleasure of just being near one another.

But I never saw Merry enough. We tried to email every day, to keep up the morning selfies, but my life was no longer my own. The bigger the band got, the more pressing the engagements upon my time. Our walking holiday in Wales had to be cancelled because The Curse added another three nights to make a string of massive festival dates, with us as support. Playing for a field of tens of thousands of people... it just didn't make conceptual sense. Like, I could see the people, stretching out as far as the eye could see, but from the massive stage, only the first dozen rows actually looked like human beings. The rest just waved their arms in the air like a field of wheat. I had got used to playing in massive fields at summer festivals, but nothing was as big as that Curse concert. The scale just boggled the mind. There was a point at which the brain could no longer process such an inhuman scale. I pulled out my in-ear monitors for a moment to try and hear the noise coming off that large an audience, but it made the echoey onstage sound impossible, so I shoved them back in my ears and did my best to pretend we were still playing as tight as we had when we were shoved in sweaty basements on Ludlow Street. 

As I watched The Curse from the wings, my eyes fell on Simon Fillup, and I remembered Merry telling me once that he had been her inspiration to start playing bass. God, how she loved The Curse, put them on as comfort music, even slept in a faded _Prostitution_ T-shirt sometimes. I'd desperately wanted her to Peter-Book in for a day, and be beside me for the occasion, knowing how much she would have loved it, knowing how much it would have meant to her to hear her favourite band of all time play all those familiar songs. But Deltawave were off to Japan, one of the few countries left where they were still really big, like stadium-filling huge, for a last-ditch career-saving tour. So I bought her a T-shirt and a commemorative live CD and the tour programme. As I stood in the wings and snapped photos on my digital camera of Fillup rocking out, his bass banging about his knees, he looked over and grinned at me, nodding at me with a wink to say _I see you doing that_. 

Almost shitting myself, I approached him nervously at dinner, the next date of the mini-tour, and explained, "You see, my girlfriend Merry is a massive fan of yours, she told me she even started playing bass because of you, and look, I know it's super uncool to ask, but would you mind just signing something for her - she'd be so thrilled, or I wouldn't ask..."

And at that, he grinned broadly, and declared in that funny Croydon accent of his "Merry from Deltawave? She's a fan? Oh wow, that's so ossum! I loved that record they did... _Shame, shame, such a shame._ " Then he actually offered to sign and dedicate her tour programme, scrawling ' _to Merry, the prettiest bass-player in the world, shame shame such a shame you couldn't be here, brightening our backstage XOXO Si_ ' across the cover, and even gave me a couple of his picks for her. 

It actually stunned me, how nice he was, the contrast between his friendly, easy-going demeanour, and his onstage image, all that tangled black punk rock hair and spiked leather. "Have you got that camera?" he asked. I found my little camera, and handed it to Duncan, explaining how it worked. Then Simon and I posed for a couple of pictures together, and Christ did that feel weird, standing, posing, with Simon Fillup's arm around my shoulders as he gave the camera a rock star grin and a big thumbs up, me in my suit and him in his leathers. (Dieter was jealous as all hell, because, see, Dieter was also a massive fan of Simon Fillup, but of course, he was way, way too cool to ask for a photo or an autograph.) When I emailed the photos over to my girlfriend, and told her that Simon Fillup not just loved her band, but actually sung one of her songs at me, I could almost hear Merry's fangirl squeal all the way from Japan.

Once or twice, Merry snatched a few days off and Peter-Booked out to Kansas or California to find me, and we always met up on the rare occasions we found themselves in the same city, but it was never long enough. Three days in New York, two days in LA, a crazy weekend at a Swedish Festival, they were stolen moments that always sped by too fast. Things were not good in the Deltawave camp, I knew that, and I tried to be supportive, but there was never the time to hear her out like I knew she needed me. I would see her at Christmas, I promised - we had a full month off, then. And Merry would pretend to smile, and kiss me, and go back to a situation I knew was making her miserable.

My own band was going halfway crazy by the end of the tour. Clara was keeping Dick sane and on the rails, but Doyle was going actually insane with sexual frustration, and Dieter, though everyone tried hard not to notice, was developing a fully blown coke habit. Strange shit happened on tour, and even I was at the point where I got through a bottle of Chablis nearly every night.

Dieter, by this point, was just impossible. Even Tony had given up paying the slightest bit of attention to him. Once or twice, Doyle made a joke that perhaps it was time that we should have two tourbuses, like Guns N Roses had one for the band, and one for Axl. And believe it or not, I actually started to consider whether it would be economically viable to hire a second tourbus just for Dieter and his... entourage.

He had always been irritating and demanding, but now, the slightest thing would set him off. We were somewhere in the Deep South - Georgia or Alabama, I was having trouble telling them apart - en route to a gig in Athens, when Dieter ran out of hair gel. Hair gel, for fucks sake, like, who the fuck would have realised that running out of hair gel could trigger such an existential crisis. Dieter started carrying on like this was a calamity, and demanded that the entire bus stop, to go off in search of a pharmacy where he could purchase some more gel.

"Calm down," I foolishly told Dieter. "We'll get to Athens soon enough, and I'm sure you can find some there."

"That's not good enough," Dieter demanded. "It's hours until we get to Athens, and I need hair gel _now_."

"OK, OK, you can borrow my hair gel until then," I offered, digging through my luggage to find my toiletries bag. "Here."

Dieter took my tub of hair gel and held it, gingerly, at arm's length, as if he were worried he would be contaminated by it. "No, no, no, this will _not_ do." He practically flung the pot back at me, and to be honest, if he'd broken the tub and spilled my hair gel, I would have fucking lost it at that point.

"What's wrong with it?" I mean, I thought I was particular about my hair gel, especially getting the silicone-free kind so it didn't set off Merry's allergies, but I always made sure I had enough to last the tour before we set out.

"It's relaxed hold gel," Dieter explained tetchily.

"Of course it's relaxed hold. I don't want a fucking helmet head." That, too, was for Merry. I knew how much she loved pulling little curls out of the side of my slicked-back hair.

"I require _bone straight_ hair gel," Dieter snapped. "Industrial Strength Goth Goo, bone straight gel. How hard is that to remember? I've only been using the same styling product since fucking art school. How hard is it for any of you people to remember any of my fucking preferences? _Ever_?"

With this, he left the little area outside the bathroom, and flounced off towards the front of the bus, and I suddenly cottoned on to where he was going. "Oh no, you don't. You are not bothering the fucking driver to go and get you some stupid goth goop... Tony!" I yelled up the stairs.

Tony flung himself down the stairs in a blur of denim and long blond hair, and headed Dieter off at the pass, while I nipped into the bathroom that Dieter had clearly abandoned, and locked the door behind me. I could still hear them arguing, and Dieter railing against me for bathroom-hijacking, even as I squeezed a line of relaxed hold unscented Gentleman's Dip-Dap onto my comb to restyle my own slept-on hair.

When we finally got to Athens, I swear to god, Dieter got in a cab, and went to every single pharmacy or beauty supply shop within a two-mile radius of the theatre. But wouldn't you know it, there was no Goth Goo brand gel to be had in Georgia for love nor money, in fact, Goth Goo was barely distributed outside of New York City and LA. And when Dieter completely blew his top, and had Tony ring the phone number on the empty gel package from his cellphone - because clearly running out of hair gel was a fucking emergency - he was told that the only distributor of Goth Goo outside New York and California was in New Orleans. You know, the city we had just left at 2am that morning.

Of course there was a scene backstage, with someone threatening to refuse to play the show and get on a plane back to New York unless someone could come up with some industrial strength hair gel. I paced up and down the hall outside as Tony tried to reason with our ridiculous bass player. Doyle and Sal were cackling like a pair of hyaenas, as if they found this the funniest thing ever, while Dick and Clara headed back to the bus, as it was starting to look like we weren't even going to soundcheck.

"I'll come with you," I sighed, just wanting to be out of earshot of the more irritating members of my band, but as we walked out the front doors, I caught sight of the line of punters queueing up outside the venue. My first instinct was to cringe, like, holy shit, were they gonna be trouble? Was I gonna have to call Ronnie or Steve to walk us to the bus? But as people started to notice us, I had a sudden mad idea. Taking a deep breath, I walked up to the front of the queue, blushing as a wave of murmurs went down the line of young, hip kids all dressed up in their gig-going best. "Guys, this is a long-shot," I ventured. "But we have a bit of an emergency. I don't suppose one of you is a qualified hairdresser?"

There was more murmuring, and a susurration of debate up and down the queue before, finally, a young woman near the back stood up and dragged her boyfriend towards me. "I"m a hairstylist," she told me, snapping her chewing gum.

I looked the pair of them up and down. Both of them were dressed in a kind of gothic-rockabilly style, all leopard print and leather, which looked absolutely unbearable in this heat. But the girl's bobbed hair was bleached completely platinum white, and back-combed up into a near-perfect period beehive, while the dude, a skinny guy with slightly scary popping eyes that reminded me a bit of Blixa Bargeld, he had a full rockabilly quiff that must have stood about six inches off his head. Someone, between the two of them, clearly knew their way around a comb and some hair product.

"Do you have your gear?"

"Oh, you want gear," she laughed and cracked her gum. "Oh yeah, I can get you gear all right. What do you need?"

"I meant your hairdressing gear. Combs, hairspray, gel. That kind of thing," I specified.

She and Blixa Quiffgeld exchanged looks. "It's back at my house. We're only about ten minutes away."

I glanced down at my watch. We only had forty-five minutes until the doors were due to open. "Look, if you can go home and get your stuff, and get back here, I will get you backstage passes... and... and... concert T-shirts and autographed albums and whatever else you want."

"Backstage passes - and free tickets?" I nodded. The girl looked at her boyfriend, then shrugged. "Ring Mark and Abbey and ask if they wanna buy our tickets off us. I'll be back in ten."

She returned in about fifteen minutes, puffing slightly as she carried a large, black vinyl case covered in Siouxsie and the Banshees stickers, her chest heaving against her too-tight shirt until I thought her bra would pop open. With the pair of them in tow, I knocked on the theatre door, and lead them back through the maze backstage to the dressing room, though honestly, they could have found it themselves from the volume of the complaining inside.

"You said there was an emergency," said the girl, glancing around as she entered the dressing room, but then she saw Dieter, still sitting in front of the mirror, his face almost purple with anger, his hair crimped into tight curls by the heat and humidity into something approaching an afro. "Oh my god. That's a disaster." Immediately, she went to him, and started trying to untangle the mess.

"What the fuck are you doing? Who the hell said you could touch my hair?" snapped Dieter, not even realising the girl had been summonsed to help him.

"Wow, you are cranky. Looks like someone really does need some gear." Moving over towards her case, she dug in the bottom and pulled a plastic container full of glitter.

"I fail to see how _this_..." Dieter started to rail, but his voice dropped off as she unscrewed the bottom of the container to reveal a secret compartment, filled with a familiar looking white powder. "Ah."

"Appetiser?" she offered, pouring some out onto a hand mirror and cutting it with an old fashioned straight razor.

Dieter's eyes lit up, glittering as he moved towards the girl, and I realised that it was not just the lack of hair gel that had triggered this tantrum. "That will be just the ticket."

"Oh, for fucks sake," I muttered to myself, wandering off and leaving them to it, as I heard the girl start to hold forth on hair products.

"Dieter, ole buddy, I am tempted to give you a root perm right here. But trust me, you want relaxing products? We are in the Deep South, we have relaxing products like you would not _believe_. You don't even want to mess around with those modern silicone based gels. In this heat, you want the old fashioned stuff. The wax. Women down here, we invented the B-52, the Beehive, the helmet-head, and buddy, I can give you hair that is bulletproof..."

OK, fair enough. Dieter's hair that night looked amazing. It wasn't just perfectly straight and glossy and black, it actually swished when he tossed his head about, the straightener holding even while my gel gave up and my hair curled up into corkscrews as I bounced around the stage, sweat pouring down my face and washing the gel, stinging, into my eyes. Whatever that old lady pomade she had used on him was, it fucking worked - though for the rest of the tour Dieter smelled, constantly, faintly, of sweet violets.

And sure enough, that evening, after the show, our already crowded tourbus gained another two occupants as Dieter's new drug buddies moved into the back lounge. That upset matters, as Sal normally slept back there, but she didn't like our gothabilly Sid and Nancy, narrowing her eyes and moving forward into the front lounge. That upset Clara, who had been storing her unexposed film in there, and they butted heads constantly.

Clara, sensing an ally, decided to confide in me. "What is she even doing on the bus anyway? She's not anyone's girlfriend - she's not even anyone's drug dealer." This with a pointed glance back towards the rear lounge. Clara did not even normally acknowledge the existence of Sid and Nancy. "How do you guys even survive, not just trying to live in this tiny, cramped space, with weirdoes and hangers-on constantly trying to invade it - but trying to be creative in such an environment?"

"That's a very good question," I sighed, my fingers itching for my laptop, my headphones and my bunkbed. "A very good question."

Things came to a head in Miami, in more ways than one. I was already uncharacteristically drunk, even before dinner. I'd been drinking mellow rum punch for most of the afternoon because it was only a festival and we weren't headlining, then some pretty heavy weed had followed the rum round the table. Dieter was twitchy, but he managed to score the purest coke of the whole tour, his face locked in a rictus grin as he described how amazing the high was.

Doyle and Sal had been scrapping for days, ever since Sid and Nancy had joined the tour, but that evening, they ended up in a proper fight, a real screaming match. So she got the hump and stormed off, saying she'd had enough of Doyle and had enough of Metropolis, why couldn't he understand that she was gay, and just not interested, and stop pestering her. This time, she was serious, she actually went back to the tourbus and packed her rucksack, and asked Tony to call her a taxi to the airport. And my god, if you could have seen the look of relief on Clara's face at that announcement, like, Clara was genuinely a sweet, lovely girl who wouldn't hurt a fly; she and Merry got on like a house on fire. But the way she looked at Sal as she left, it was positively malevolent. Then Doyle said fuck this, he was going off to score, and I was so stoned that it took me about five minutes to realise that Doyle was going off to score _smack_.

Running around in a frantic hurry, I tried to find him, but he wasn't on the tour bus, and neither was he in the hotel the festival had laid on. It was getting late, and even in the low latitude, the night was getting darker. The courtyard where we had been drinking was crawling with people, other bands, festival VIPs, so I returned to the trailer we'd been giving as a dressing room. And there was Doyle. 

Doyle, backed up against a sink, his long, pretty hair floating about his bare, freckled shoulders, his eyes closed, his mouth open, panting desperately. But as my eyes slipped down, across his naked chest, his heaving stomach, his jeans unzipped and pushed off his hips, I saw a dark-haired head labouring between Doyle's thighs. A dark-haired head attached to a familiar German World War I uniform, and a long, lanky body, doubled up and kneeling at Doyle's feet, making a terrible slurping sound, and though I never actually saw the face, my mind just _stopped_ when I tried to process who it could be or _what he was doing_. Like, this was a concept that my brain refused to process, the same way it had refused to process the size of the crowd at Hyde Park. And so I backed away, unseen, the way I came, and closed the door silently behind me, and went and sat down at our table, staring into the rum punch I no longer wanted to drink and the bong I no longer wanted to smoke. Maybe I had hallucinated the whole thing, after all.

But the show that night was great; almost unusually great. My band were incandescent that night, after a series of not terrible, but slightly lackluster gigs across the South. Playing that festival in Miami, Doyle loosened up and smiled onstage, and even joked with the crowd about Miami's excellent drugs once or twice. And on the other side of the stage, Dieter cavorted about the stage like a man possessed, stomping and marching across the stage, his handsome face twisted with an awful, ugly smile - a smile of _triumph_.


	35. Helter Skelter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
> 
> The tensions within Deltawave finally come to a head as the band implodes amid nudies, press feuds and untenable demands.
> 
> Metropolis, on the other hand, are on a rocket ride to the major leagues. But as the band are poised to sign to a major label, Dieter's private life and sexual (lack of) mores come back to bite him, as internet rumour explodes into public.

Autumn turned into winter, and then finally the tour was over, as the band limped back to New York in a slush-storm. It was so wet and cold and miserable that I got a taxi back to my loft, but I could see from the road that the lights were on, on the top floor. My heart lifted, even as I hauled my guitar and my suitcase through the slush to the door. That meant Merry was home, an unscheduled but nonetheless welcome surprise!

"Sweetheart! My Daw-ling! The ice man returneth!" I called once the freight elevator bumped up to our floor. I unlocked the heavy metal door to be greeted by her bass cabinet and a crate of gear stencilled with DELTAWAVE in a pile near the kitchen. OK, that was weird, as normally her gear went back to the band's rehearsal studio in Brooklyn. "Merry? Your lover is back, and he is a human icicle, and in need of warmth..." Dumping my guitar and suitcase, I walked across the open floor, but I did not see my girlfriend. "Sweetheart?" I called out, more softly, then finally saw that the bed was occupied. When she didn't move, didn't roll over, didn't turn towards me and throw out her arms for the hug and kisses I'd expected to deliver, I panicked. "Merry," I said sharply, running towards the bed, suddenly afraid of the worst.

"I'm here," she finally sighed, and moved slightly, as if just to prove she was alive.

"Are you OK? Are you ill?"

She shook her head and sat up, blinking, but her hair was unwashed and unbrushed, and the light had gone out of her eyes. "I'm not ill."

"Have you eaten? Should I ring for takeaway?" I hovered round her, concerned.

"There's... stuff in the fridge if you want. I'm not hungry. Chinese takeaway, help yourself."

I retreated to the kitchenette and started to microwave the tofu and vegetables I found there. "Are you going to tell me what's wrong."

Sighing deeply, she pulled herself out of bed, and wrapped my dressing gown around her waist. "Oh, Danny. It's over."

I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. No, it couldn't be. I knew I had been neglecting her, I knew that there were several of her unanswered emails waiting in my inbox, but I had just put them off, knowing I would be home soon. She couldn't just end it, not like this... could she? "It can't be," I managed to gasp.

She shook her head helplessly, and I felt the floor fall away beneath me. "No, it's for real this time. Deltawave is finished. It's over."

Putting my hand out against the kitchen countertop to steady me, I felt my world stop spinning. Her _band_. Oh thank fuck, she meant her band and not me. And then it hit me, what she'd just said. "I can't believe Bebe would drop you guys... and even if she was stupid enough to do it, you're still a hot property. You could downsize to a smaller label, one where you'd get more attention."

Merry put her head into her hands. "No, you don't understand. We've not been dropped. Elisha has walked. He quit. He's taken his ball and gone home. Do you know how many times I wanted to quit, especially when he was shooting his mouth off about me to the NME? But no, I stuck it out, because I believed in the band. He's just trying to prove a point, this is his final power play. He just wants to rub it in my face one last time, that he still holds all the cards, he still gets to make the decision. There is no more Deltawave. It's _over_."

"But _why_?"

"This is the insane bit. He told me I had to stop modelling - or, rather, 'getting my tits out for the wank-rags' as he so eloquently put it - or leave the band. I told him to stuff it." She laughed pathetically, without humour. "I mean, that's the irony. I fucking hate modelling - I'd quit it tomorrow if you asked me. Though of course you never will ask me to, because I think you get off on having a _Firbank model_ for a girlfriend, don't you. But the idea that _he_... could get to dictate, what I am and am not allowed to do outside the band? Fuck that shit."

"Shit," I said quietly. I wished I'd paid more attention, wished I'd been in contact with Bebe, wished I'd at least tried to speak to Elisha. Elisha had trusted me, once upon a time. I could have told him not to do it. I could have... Wait. No. What the fuck could I have done, sitting on a tourbus a thousand miles away, with Dieter's girls chopping out lines of coke in the back lounge? "Shit! Do you want a drink? Glass of wine maybe? I could do with a glass of wine."

"There's no more wine. Drank it. And the whisky, and the vodka, too." Her voice was very small.

I walked over to her, took her by the chin and raised her head, seeing the glassy expression in her eyes for what it was. "Are you drunk?"

"I've been blitzed for three days. It hasn't helped."

"You're to sober up. I'm making you a cup of tea, then you're having a hot bath and then I'm putting you to bed." It wasn't fair, I wanted to protest. Here, I had just got off a gruelling 5-month tour, and wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed and relax, and I was doing damage control for someone else's band. But then Merry raised her head and looked into my eyes with such a plaintive look that I instantly felt like a cad for thinking it.

"So am I dumped?" she asked, very quietly.

" _What_?"

"You don't want me any more, now I'm not a rock star, do you?" I could tell she was quite drunk now, just from the slurring of her voice, let alone the crazy, insecure things she was spilling out into the silence. "The whole time we've been together, it's been your band this, my band that. Do you still even want to be with me now I don't even have a band any more?"

"Merry!" I brought over a cup of tea and placed it in front of her, then put my arm around her shoulders, pulling her towards me, running my fingers through her knotted hair to try to pull the snarls out. "How can you even think that? I daw you! I love you, not your band. You."

"I don't even feel like _me_ , any more. I don't even know what me is right now."

"Do _you_ still love me?" I asked, terrified of her reply.

Raising her head, she tried to focus on me. "Yeah. Course I do. That might be the only thing I'm sure of right now."

"Well, drink your tea and eat your dinner and go to bed. We'll figure out the rest of it in the morning." I smiled and tried to pretend like it was a normal night, like we were a normal couple, just eating our dinner, but it didn't work.

I didn't sleep much that night. Merry was sick, and vomited up her dinner, plus an awful lot of wine, into the toilet for a good part of the night. And I lay back in bed, arms folded above my head, staring out the window, feeling unable to sleep in a room that wasn't moving and shaking and buffeting through the night at 60 miles per hour. Deltawave was finished, just like that. I kept telling myself that I should actually just be selfish, and be happy. Merry would retire now, and she would bear my children, and stay home and we would be a family. Merry, at least, would get back to normal, even if my band continued to explode like a shooting star. Wait. Did shooting stars explode, or implode, or just burn up on re-entry? I couldn't remember, but I wanted off the rocket ride, for just a moment. And maybe, at last, this endless prolonged adolescence of my own would end, once I had children, once I became a family man, and had something solid to return home to at the end of these impossible tours. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine our sons and daughters, tried to imagine Merry standing in a sunlit English field, looking like Meredith in those old photos, holding two tow-headed toddlers by the hands. They had names, those children we'd failed to conceive in Connecticut and in Paris; Danielle and Marcus, maybe now we could make them real.

But then, in the core of my heart, I suddenly feared that Merry would never be happy like that. It hadn't been the _band_ that had kept us from getting married and settling down and having kids. It had been Merry.

Finally, I got Merry back into bed, and got her to keep down a glass of water, and heard her drift off to sleep beside me. I snatched a few hours of sleep, knowing she would probably sleep for most of the day if she'd been up as long as she said she had, but my phone started ringing at about 10 o'clock. I woke with that terrible fitful start I always suffered the first day home from a long tour, not really knowing where the hell I was without the familiar walls of my coffin-sized bunk about me. Oh yeah. My loft in Soho. Home. And the bleeping sound was my fucking landline. Whoever it was, was not giving up, so I stumbled over and picked up.

It was Taylor. I dragged the cordless handset into the lumber room so as not to wake my girlfriend, and took the call. "Oh, come on," I complained. "Do you not know the meaning of the words _time off_? I've had a sick girlfriend and three hours of sleep."

"It's about Gerry. We have to talk."

"Gerry? Oh come on, we're selling hundreds of thousands of records. We're in no danger of getting dropped."

"That's the problem. You're selling hundreds of thousands. You should be selling millions. Musketeer cannot keep up with how big you are getting. We need to discuss your options, and we need to discuss them soon, before you go into the next album cycle. How about a drink, tomorrow afternoon? And not near the Musketeer offices."

I let Merry sleep it off for the next day and a half, ordering plain white rice from the Chinese takeaway for when she felt strong enough to eat again. Then, after I had finally caught up on sleep myself, I dressed and got ready to meet Taylor.

I'd agreed to meet Taylor at the Lacuna Lounge, for old time's sake, but I was shocked, as I walked up Ludlow Street, how much had changed. I'd been away for most of the past year or two, sure, and the little time I'd had off, I'd mostly spent in the apartment with Merry, or visiting family uptown. But Ludlow Street was changing. Gentrification had been slowly crawling down it from both ends, but there wasn't so much as a bodega in sight any more. Shops that had been there for as long as I could remember had gone, replaced by fancy restaurants and edgy bars. There was a building sign at one of the crossroads, and a sign saying a boutique hotel was going up. A boutique hotel, on Ludlow? What the fuck?

At least the Lacuna Lounge looked approximately the same, as I stepped in the door and looked around for Taylor - yes, she was sitting in the infamous front booth - so I asked her what she was drinking and went to the bar to get a round in. The bartender, not Charlene, but some new guy I didn't even recognise, refused to let me pay.

"Come on, man, don't be silly. I'm flush, it's fine, I can afford it now," I laughed nervously, feeling awkward. Even when Charlene had given us free drinks, she always made it feel like it was some favour that Metrpolis was doing her, just by hanging around. It had always been a mutual thing, with Charlene, credits and debts that would be repaid with gigs or free copies of the single. These free drinks, for some reason, felt like a scam.

"No way, Mr Asheton," replied the bartender, looking more than slightly starstruck. "On the house."

"Mr Asheton is my father. I'm Daniel." I left a large tip and picked up the drinks, but as I turned around, I became distinctly conscious that people were staring at me. Come on, it was 7 o'clock on a Tuesday evening, this was ridiculous. But the place was filling up, even as I sat down to talk to Taylor. "So what's this about Musketeer. I like Musketeer. Gerry's like family."

"We're getting other offers. Bigger offers. I'd be remiss not to have you take a look at them."

"How big..." I started to venture, but someone came over to the table and interrupted.

"Hi... Oh my god, Daniel from Metropolis. Please could you sign an autograph?"

I smiled and shrugged, asked the kid's name, and scrawled my name on a piece of paper. No skin off my teeth, and besides, it was flattering really. After a brief conversation, I managed to satisfy the fan, and turned back to my conversation with Taylor. "How big? Because if we're just talking 2 or 3 times as big, it's not really worth it. We're fine for money and..."

"Oh my god, Daniel Asheton, dude, how's it hanging? Here's a flyer for my band's gig, it'd be great if you could come down..." A young man appeared, forcing a flyer on me, so I thanked him and took it, folding it and placing it in my pocket, oddly reminded of my first conversation with Merry. Had it really happened in this very booth? How many years ago, now? But the man wouldn't go away. "Hey, Dan, man, will you take a photo with me?" He didn't so much ask as demand, invading my personal space as he put arm around my shoulder, then produced a digital camera, flashing it in our faces.

"Look, I'm very sorry, but I'm trying to have a private conversation..." I suggested diplomatically, blinking against the light.

"It's cool, man, you don't have to be an asshole about it," sniffed the lad, retreating, but sounding slightly hurt.

"We are not talking 2 or 3 times the budget," Taylor started up again. "We are talking 10 times the budget."

"Phew," I whistled. "That's some serious cash."

"Excuse me, but my girlfriend just asked... You're Daniel from Metropolis, aren't you? Oh my god, I love your last album, we've been coming to the Lacuna for months now, hoping to spot you, cause everyone knows you guys hang out here and..."

Taylor and I finished our drinks quickly, and left, even as the hip new bartender muttered something under his breath about "Fucking rock stars, too stuck up to drink at the Lacuna now..."

"I am so sorry," I apologised as we headed for Houston, trying to flag down a taxi for a ride to somewhere quieter. "I didn't think..."

Taylor just laughed. "You have no idea how big you are now, do you? You are way bigger than Mickey Mouseketeer Records, you know. Those kids are proving my point for me. I'll ring ahead and see if I can get us a private table at Boucci."

It felt so odd being whisked past the velvet rope at Boucci, and ushered to a discreet, private booth near the back. I felt like this somehow wasn't my life, like I'd somehow sidestepped out of my own life of the Pink Pony and the Lacuna Lounge, and landed in a bizarro-world version of my parents' upscale life. After ordering appetisers and drinks, Taylor asked if they had a power outlet she could use, and the waiter discreetly parted a curtain on the back wall, and she plugged her laptop in while we waited for our food.

"If madam would like to use the house WiFi," the waiter offered, passing her a card with some codes printed on it.

"WiFi?" I asked, realising I truly had stepped into a new world. "Can you wire your WiFi though my HiFi?" It was the kind of joke that Merry would have laughed at, but Taylor was nonplussed, as if all this crazy technology was normal to her.

"You can wire the internet through anything you like these days," she shrugged as she dialled into her office email, right from the restaurant table. "Here, look at this contract from Sony, it offers a better cut than Capitol, but it has more conditions and covers less markets. Let me know what you think..."

"Fuck... this amount of money... Do they really think we're worth this?" My hands were almost shaking as I tried to figure out the catch attached to all those 0's. Merry was right, the music industry was nothing but catches, the trick was to learn which ones you could live with.

"Daniel, have you been living under a rock? You guys are a seriously hot property, you might even have started a new musical _movement_. Every record company wants a Lacuna Lounge band right now. The Charms have signed with MVC for an undisclosed amount, rumoured to be mid six figures, Phil Rocket Pops' new band, The Louche, who have Laura from the Motivators on guitar, have signed with Sony/BMG. I brokered that deal myself. Four albums, half a million. The Stakes are on DGI. Even Motion Sickness have signed to Warner on the strength of one of them having been your ex drummer!"

"I've been on tour," I shrugged. I had no idea how I'd missed all this. Time was a Lacuna band couldn't even send a demo to a record company without my knowing about it. So Motion Sickness had finally got signed, but only on the strength of their Metropolis connection? I suppressed a sick cackle, even as I tried to get my head around how the scene was changing. This was worse than that time everyone started copying my Serious Beard. Way worse. I scratched my stubbly face, then started giggling at Motion Sickness again.

"Come on, stop giggling over your triumph over Darin and pick one of these contracts. You've being courted, quite seriously, so just enjoy it."

"I've never been courted before in my life, ooh, I'm coming over all shy and coy," I quipped. That was a lie. I had been seriously courted exactly once. It just happened to have been by Merry Wythenshawe.

I looked through the various contracts as I sipped my dry martini, trying to make sense of the reams and reams of legalese, but then our food came, and Taylor put the laptop to one side, changing the topic. The Australian tour had opened up the Oceanic and East Asia market, so how did we feel about touring Indonesia, the Philipines, Singapore? OK, maybe, after the next album? Marketing and Merchandising took us through into the main course, as I considered the wisdom of partnering with Victoria's Secret for a special line of Metropolis Branded Lingerie, over a mouthwatering Kale Tagliatelle with artisanal cheese flakes and truffle oil.

"I don't know about this. I'm going to have to ask Merry, get her opinion on whether this is sexy or gross," I hedged.

"Their N'SYNC line was actually quite tasteful. I've got a pair of Justins," Taylor shrugged.

"You don't think there's a... slight difference between Metropolis and N'SYNC?" I asked, not sure whether to be insulted or not.

"A difference of scale, or a difference of aesthetic? They would be discreetly branded. Classy. European. It's not like we're going to put your heads on teenage girls' crotches or anything."

"I have to admit, I'm a little weirded out by the idea of my face on anyone's panties. I'm not sure how comfortable I am with that. Though I'm sure that Dieter would be absolutely thrilled by the idea of his face on random women's crotches."

"Let's not talk about Dieter and his Crotch. Ugh, that website is giving us such a legal headache right now. Heck, I just think it's more publicity, more grist for the mill, but it makes Gerry really uncomfortable. Men, huh?" Taylor shrugged dismissively, but I felt a prickle go up the back of my neck.

"What website?" I asked innocently.

"Oh god. Deiter Crotch Watch dot com." Laying her napkin down, she gestured to the waiter that she was OK with him taking her plates away. "It's just some dumb teenage shit, just skirting the limits of legality, but, y'know, I don't want to fuck with the fans too much. Female fans are like hornets' nests, poke them the wrong way and they blow up on you. People get stung."

"Dieter Crotch Watch," I repeated, not sure whether to burst out laughing or consider hiring a bodyguard. "Show me."

"You don't want to see this. Really, trust me. We've been protecting you, not talking about what some of the nuttier fans get up to. Sandra keeps half an eye on it to make sure it doesn't get out of hand, but really, it's just fantasy."

" _Show_ me."

Rolling her eyes and insisting that she did warn me it was a bad idea, Taylor reached for her laptop and pulled it up on a bookmark. And as I started to read, I felt my kale tagliatelle sitting uneasily on my gut. Dieter Crotch Watch was halfway between a blog and a messageboard, with posts and a full commenting system. Users could log in anonymously, or under assumed names, and post... well, stories. Stories about Dieter's sexual exploits, mostly, comparing notes and sharing information. Some of them were so obviously fabrications that I had to laugh - I was almost entirely certain that Dieter had never in his life been to the Emma Willard School in Troy NY, let alone snuck into the dorm room of a 14 year old girl with such a fevered imagination and total lack of understanding of the mechanics of sex. (Seven times in one night? Come on, not even Dieter could manage that, especially given the amount of cocaine he had been consuming recently.) But others were more convincing, and some of the users had avatars and photos. One of the girls, though she had her eyes blocked out with a black bar that said "MetropoSlut", looked incredibly familiar, and I had the sneaking suspicion, looking at her distinctive facial piercing, that she had spent quite some time on the bus on the last tour.

Christ, these girls had some imagination on them, mostly fuelled with the frustration of teenage hormones, no doubt. I mean, I knew the kind of effort that teenage fans were willing to put into their idols - and in the early days, with people like Sandra and Becca, we had undoubtedly benefited from that enthusiasm. (And in their case, rewarded them with remuneration once we could afford to!) But this was different. Very different.

There was one post that had over 100 comments on it, which turned out to be theories - most of them dirty - about the secret meanings behind our album and song titles. Most of them were patently absurd! Apparently, _Lights! Camera! Action!_ was supposed to somehow be about a porno film? And _Semantics_. Instead of the patently obvious lift from Dieter's catchphrase, one of the girls suggested that it was a contraction of "Semen Antics" - which had caught on like a meme, and 'semen antics' had become some forum codeword for some act... I didn't even want to know what. On one level, it was kind of inspiring, the amount of creativity and playfulness on display, some of them were clearly very funny and witty - but seriously, why couldn't they use that creativity and wit for something worthwhile, instead of weird stories about fucking band members? It was kinda sad, really, and made me feel distinctly weird. Even slightly violated.

There was a search field at the top, so on impulse, I typed my own name into it. That was a mistake. The first result that popped up declared: DANIEL ASHETON. IS HE GAY? followed by an over-entitled rant about the fact that I never took any sexual interest in the groupies, yet had been seen repeatedly disappearing into the hotel room of the (male) guitarist of the support band on the last American jaunt. I blushed furiously. Of course I had been in and out of Branwell's room throughout the tour. Branwell used a MIDI controller to trigger samples from his pedals, and I had been learning to use it and was considering integrating it into some of the more texturally complex songs we were writing for the next album. Was there nothing these sick little girls couldn't twist into something sordid and ugly?

But then I saw the comments below the post. "Don't be fucking stupid. Daniel's been with Merry from Deltawave for years. She's totally the Anita Pallenberg of Metropolis." followed by "fucking h8 that bitch slut, i tell u, imma cut her if i c that bicth show her face in flow rida!!!!1"

I pulled away sharply, my head spinning. "I am not OK with this," I stuttered, hitting the back button repeatedly.

"I told you not to look," Taylor warned me. "They don't mean it. That chick is 12 if she's a day, look at her spelling. Don't take any of it seriously. It's nothing. It's... it's just fan fiction, really."

"Fan fiction? Do I even want to know what that is?" Sighing deeply, and fighting down the bile of my anger, I moved to close the browser window, but in the meanwhile, the front page of the blog auto-refreshed, and a new post came up. 

DIETER FINKEL HAS FUCKING AIDS.

I didn't know what it was that made me click on the post and read it - if it was the casual way the girl showed she knew Dieter's surname, which had been carefully kept from the press at all costs; or if it was the photo on her avatar, a close-up of a girl's bust, showing a pendant hanging down over breasts bursting out of a leopard skin bra. I recognised that pendant - a revolting diamante thing with "JunkieSlut" emblazoned over the top of an ambiguous shape that might have been a fully extended stick of lipstick or the barrel of a hypodermic needle filling with a backwash of blood. That girl had definitely been on the bus. Repeatedly. I recognised her not just as one of Dieter's regular fucks, but one of the band's regular sources of drugs, too.

"MY BOYFRIEND JUST TESTED POSITIVE FOR HIV. WE KNOW IT CAME FROM YOU. SO THANKS FOR THAT, DEE, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!!!"

Feeling the room spinning with a dizziness that had nothing to do with the second martini I'd just finished, I stared at the screen, then pointed slowly, accusingly, towards it. "That is not a joke."

"What, no way." Taylor turned the laptop towards her and read it again. "Right, I'll get the lawyers on this. This is libellous. We can get the site taken down. We can track her IP address and serve court orders..."

"But what if it's true?" My voice shook as I tried to get my head around the concept. "What if this girl's boyfriend gave them AIDS... or what if Dieter _did_ infect them both?" I felt my head throbbing, thinking of all the women that Dieter had slept with on tour. Dieter's attitude towards barrier methods was, well, relaxed to say the least. What if my band was a rolling epidemic?

"Don't be ridiculous. Dieter does not have AIDS."

"Are you certain of that? Would you have sex with Dieter without a condom?" As I said it, my mind flashed back to that night in Miami, to the dark head bobbing between Doyle's thighs.

"I wouldn't have sex with Dieter with someone else's vagina," Taylor snorted.

"That girl is for real. I know she fucked him. We have got to... Fuck, can you get the check? We need to get over to Fancy Delancey, and quick."

I fretted the entire way over in the cab, wondering how on earth you dropped it on someone that they might have just been handed a death sentence. "I've read it can be managed, I've read that people sometimes live for years, on anti-virals..." I tried to console myself as much as I worried about Dieter. What the fuck would happen to the band if Dieter had to go into hospital for a long-term course of drug treatment?

"He does not have..." Taylor started to insist, but her cell phone went. "Hello? Yes, this is she. Rolling Stone want us to conform or deny _what_? No comment. Nope, no comment. Yeah, this conversation is over, bye." She flipped the phone off and started swearing. "Fuck, piss, fucksticks... that fucking shitstain..."

"Rolling Stone have got hold of it?" I stuttered.

"It's all over the fucking internet. Rumours spread like wildfire on the web. I'll get our legal team on the blower now, but it might be too late."

I stared out the window as the cab inched down Broadway. Of all the fucking dumb shit I'd done when I was a kid - nothing serious, nothing like AIDS serious, but still, some drunken vandalism and assorted shenanigans - I had at least been protected by the veil of pre-Internet anonymity. Was nothing private any more? Was every indiscretion to be writ large, now, in 14 point arial all over the internet? The cab wouldn't move. There was some construction going on at the cross street, some ancient mouldering tenement being torn down and another luxury condo being thrown up in its place. New York was changing, and even the dirty Lower East Side was being dragged up with it. Finally, the pair of us gave up at Houston, and walked the rest of the distance. I felt the need to move, as if I could outrun the news, chase it to ground down the pavement of the Bowery. I punched in the door code to gain entry to Dieter's building, then took the stairs two steps at a time, beating on the door to gain entrance.

As the door swung inwards, I looked straight into the tangled hair and wild eyes of PCPete. Oh, fuck no. "Now's not a good time, Dan..."

"Don't care, get out of my way," I spat. I could be very strong when angered, and pushed PCPete aside roughly. As I charged into the living room, I took in the scene. There was a naked girl on the floor, her hands and feet bound, as Dieter sat on the sofa - still fully clothed, thank fuck - his jack boots resting on her bare back as he waved his hands, as if conducting the Throbbing Gristle track that boomed through the apartment. Ignoring the girl, I walked over to the stereo and snapped the music off.

"Hey!" protested Dieter, slipping his feet off the girl. "I was listening to that."

"Where's Doyle?" I demanded, looking around, but our singer was nowhere in sight, even his Mexican Summers poster gone from the kitchen wall.

"Doyle moved out," Dieter shrugged. "Incompatible lifestyles."

"Incompatible drug habits," PCPete sniggered. "Coke-heads and junkies, they never mix."

"Where's he gone?"

"He's moved to Williamsburg. _Brooklyn_. A borough," Dieter sniffed. "Only rats live in burrows."

"He bought a bar in Williamsburg," PCPete giggled. "That's got to cut down on your drinking bills, if you just buy your favourite bar and live above it."

"OK, I'll deal with Doyle later. Dieter, we need to talk." Moving around, I finally noticed the girl, and bent down to unbuckle her wrists, pulling her to her feet. She had a gag in her mouth, which I removed, looking carefully into her eyes to determine how high she was before asking her "Did you fuck him? Have you fucked him?"

"Not yet, thanks to you," she retorted, sounding actually angry about it.

"Put your clothes on, and go home, and thank your lucky stars for that." I waited as the girl pulled off the leather strap binding her legs, then quickly dressed, and took off, glaring back at me as she left.

"Now what the fuck is this about?" Dieter demanded, starting to cut out another line of coke on the coffee table. "Why are you determined to destroy my sex life?"

"Someone else has already taken care of that... Now, Dieter, I need to know..." I took a deep breath, the druggy, incense-laden atmosphere of the apartment messing with my head more than I cared to admit. "That rockabilly goth girl who was on the tour, all through the South. Hairdresser. Bleach-blonde bouffant hair, irritating laugh, always wore a diamante pendant that said 'JunkieSlut'... Do you remember her?"

Dieter made a face as if searching back through an impossibly large amount of memories. "Oh! Big tits, always wore a leopard skin bra that showed under her too-small shirts? Yes... JunkieSlut. Linda! That was her name. Linda and her _accommodating_ boyfriend, Frank."

"Did you bang her?"

"Of course I fucking banged her," Dieter snorted, as if it was impossible to know a woman without engaging in sexual relations with her. "No, we drank tea and talked about Wim Wenders films. What do you think?"

"Dieter, Linda's boyfriend has just tested positive for AIDS." I tried to keep my voice flat, even as I was panicking.

"Linda _alleges_ that her partner has tested positive for AIDS," Taylor corrected. "We haven't confirmed anything."

"Frank? Frank's a lying sack of shit. Those groupies are all pathological liars," Dieter spat, but he was clearly rattled, sinking back down into the sofa, his face deathly pale beneath his pancake goth makeup.

"Are you willing to stake your life on that chance? I know you have a pathological aversion to condoms," I persisted.

"The Prince Albert always breaks them anyways," Dieter tried to argue, but his hands were shaking as he tried to light a cigarette. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

"A little less fuck, fuck, fuck, and you might not be in this position," I snapped.

Taylor's phone went again and she jumped to answer it. "Hello? Yes, this is she... What? No, fuck off, Metropolis do not want to do a live intervention with Dan Savage on the finer details of safer sex... Don't call me again."

Dieter's face was aghast. "What was that? Dan Savage? How does Dan Savage know about this? If this is your idea of a publicity stunt, Taylor..."

"It was posted on the internet..."

As the full horror of the situation dawned on Dieter, his face turned from white to red. "It's on the internet... it's all over the _internet_ , that I have fucking AIDS?"

"Do you even know for certain if you have HIV or not? You need to get tested, Dieter," I found myself planning, pacing back and forward across the carpet where a naked girl had been crouching only 10 minutes previously. "Probably you, too, Pete - if you've shared needles or... anything..."

"We've... had... uuhhh... threesomes," PCPete whimpered, his whole body tightening with fear. "Fucking hell, Dieter..." He stared over at his friend with eyes widened by fright. Suddenly it looked like picking up Dieter's scraps didn't seem like such a hot idea.

"We'll get both of you tested," Taylor insisted, picking up her cell phone and dialling directory service to try to find a discreet, anonymous clinic. "What about Doyle?"

"I would never share a cunt with Doyle," Dieter spat.

I stared down at him, narrowing my eyes. "I'm not talking about a _cunt_ , Dieter, I'm talking about Miami. Would you perhaps care to restate your position on whether you can get anything from someone sucking your dick, after your experiences at the Mercury Lounge the night we got signed to Three Square?" I said, very quietly. Dieter blanched, but said nothing, as I raised one eyebrow meaningfully. "Where's Doyle living now? We need to get all three of them tested."

As Taylor tried to find them all a testing station that was open at night, then gave up and booked an appointment for the next morning, I felt myself swell with relief. I had never been so grateful to Merry in my entire life. My bandmates often ribbed me about my boring monogamous tendencies, but it turned out my pathetic, single-minded fixation on my girlfriend had protected me from something incomprehensibly awful.

Taylor told them when and where, then jumped as her phone went again. "Look, no, tell MTV no, we are not issuing a statement, no matter what Gawker allege!"

"MTV?" Dieter lit another cigarette and sucked at it hard. "It's on MTfuckingV that I have AIDS? I am never getting laid again in my life, am I? Fucking Linda... that fucking bitch..."

"You might fucking die, and you're worried about getting your cock wet?" I erupted. "Do you have any sense of perspective?"

"If I never get my cock sucked again, what is the point of fucking living?" Dieter shot back.

"Stop this immediately!" Taylor bellowed, and the boys fell instantly silent. "Where is Doyle living now? I have to head over there, or call him, or get him to the clinic tomorrow."

I walked home by myself, and opened the door of our loft to find the melancholic chords of Scott 3 echoing through the house, and my girlfriend awake, but staring out the windows to the accompaniment of _It's Raining Today_. I dumped my messenger bag on her amp, peeled off my blazer, then collapsed into Merry's arms. She was sober, thankfully, and in slightly better shape than when I had left her, but I felt awful dumping her with my problems when I knew she wasn't very strong herself. "Come on, you can tell me," she insisted, stroking my hair as I lay in her lap. "Hearing about your problems will make me feel like mine aren't so bad."

"It's too awful," I whispered, but then told her anyway.

"Christ," she muttered. "I almost feel sorry for Dieter."

"He brought it on himself," I mumbled into her thighs. "I can't even say he deserves it, because that's uncharitable. but good god, if anyone deserves it..."

"If it's true..." Merry's voice trailed off, as she bent down to kiss the top of my head. "But good god, if it's not true... The internet. They've ruined a young man's life for absolutely nothing."


	36. Thousand Dollar Wedding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First, Dieter (and Doyle) have to face the results of their HIV tests, and the aftermath of the internet's "Dieter Finkel has AIDS" rumours.
> 
> The band are officially on a break - giving Dick time to have the first Metropolis wedding - but Daniel has his hands full trying to choose which major label to sign to for the next record.
> 
> And in the meantime, with Deltawave finished and Merry out of work, is Daniel's girlfriend actually going insane from lack of occupation?

We had a nerve-wracking week waiting for the test results, during which Taylor obtained a court order and filed an injunction to take the whole Dieter Crotch Watch website down. But once the site was shut down, Linda and Frank - mostly Linda, to be fair - started bombarding Taylor's office with invective against Dieter. I mean, if you ask me, that was what it was all about in the first place - I had seen the casual way that Dieter had picked them up in Athens and dumped them in Nashville when a more... attractive option appeared on the scene, leaving them stranded hundreds of miles from home. That kind of behaviour was just asking for trouble, if not specifically crazy stalker revenge tactics. Taylor mostly did her best to ignore them. But then Linda upped the ante and faxed over a copy of their medical records, showing the diagnoses, with "THIS IS YOUR FAULT, DEE, AND YOU'RE GOING TO PAY" scrawled across the bottom.

Dieter blanched as he saw the pages, the medical terminology spelling out its doom in black and white. Folding his arms across his chest and hugging himself tightly, he recoiled physically and refused to even touch the paper - though it was a bit too late to be squeamish now! "HIV infection," Taylor read aloud, followed by a grocer's list of a pharmaceutical cornucopia of medication they'd been prescribed to control it.

But it was Doyle that spotted the odd man out in their drug cocktail. "Polamidone?" he asked, tapping his forefinger against the offending chemical. "That's not an HIV treatment."

"Oh, spare me your sudden wealth of pharmaceutical knowledge," Dieter snapped. Coming off cocaine cold turkey was really doing _wonders_ for his demeanour.

Doyle looked from one sheet of paper to the other, a triumphant sneer spreading across his face. "Both of them are on it. I knew it! Game always recognises game."

"Would you like to tell me what you two are on about?" Taylor interrupted.

"It's the trade name for Methadone," Doyle supplied with a know-it-all grin, though I did not wish to enquire the source of that knowledge. "Your Sid and Nancy are junkies. Smack-heads. That's the real source of your AIDS, Dieter."

Dieter fixed Doyle with a steely, knowing gaze as he very quietly corrected, " _Our_ AIDS, Doyle. _Ours_."

Doyle suddenly blanched and fell very silent, refusing to meet Dieter's eye. Maybe it still hadn't really hit him full-on, what he had let himself in for, with that drug-addled encounter at a Florida festival. Taylor got on her cellphone, ringing our lawyer and asking him to look up the number the fax had come from, checking our options.

I asked both Doyle and Dieter if they wanted me to go with them to get the results, for moral support or whatever, but they both insisted that my presence was neither required nor indeed wanted. It stung a little, but I suppose since I was the only one not facing a potential death sentence, it was understandable, I guess. 

Taylor rung me anyway, from outside the clinic, as soon as they had been told their results. Doyle, by some miracle, was completely clear of anything, in fact, in the prime of good health. PCPete had Hepatitis C and had been admitted to hospital for further testing of opportunistic secondary infections. Dieter, though he tested positive for both Chlamydia and HPV, and was given a course of antibiotics for the former, and a cream for the warts, was told that he was free of HIV, at least for now. If he'd had sex with an infected person in the past year, he would have to be retested again in another 6 months, because the virus could have an incredibly long incubation period. And he was told, in no uncertain terms, that he would have to use barrier methods, condoms and dental dams, until he was given the all clear.

But by the time the website was shut down and the negative test results came back, the damage had already been done. The rumours did not go away, and the internet did not forget. Although Taylor refused point blank to even countenance the rumours with an official denial, the public decided that no denial was as good as an admission. Dieter changed, became sullen and withdrawn and suspicious, where before his gregarious, albeit acerbic wit had always been a central pillar of the band. He even withdrew from the party scene after being informed curtly that he was no longer welcome at Z-Man's soirees.

"But I'm clear," he told me he'd protested to them all, furious at the injustice. "I don't even have HIV."  Not that it did much good with Zarnetski, who was furious that he had had unprotected sex with a junkie without a condom. "How was I supposed to know she was a junkie?"

"I don't know, perhaps the fact that she wore a pendant that said 'JunkieSlut' and in fact had the email address JunkieSlutStar@aol.com might have been a clue?" I had helpfully pointed out, but of course Dieter never would listen to reason.

It also knocked a dent in our major label plans. Sony withdrew their offer, suddenly deciding that Metropolis didn't have enough 'long term potential.'

"They don't think I'll be alive long enough to deliver a four album deal, do they," snorted Dieter resentfully. The offers for DJ gigs had started to come in again, but the offers for sex had not resumed. His personal life was a mess. For the first time since arriving in New York as an NYU freshman, Dieter seemed totally unable to pull, and in fact, girls that had previously given him the eye were now swinging a wide berth around him.

"That leaves DGI and MVC, though DGI want you all to pass physicals before they'll consider taking you on," Taylor explained.

"Is that even legal?" Dieter spat. "Next they'll be asking us for a fucking drug test."

"They want a drug test, too," Taylor shrugged. "And not a bad idea, considering..." She didn't even need to add Dick's name at the end of the thought as her eyes flickered towards his absent place at the end of the table. Doyle remained oddly silent.

"Is it DGI, or Windlass?" I asked, going through the contracts yet again.

"DGI proper. Windlass passed on you."

Fuck. That couldn't not be personal. But then again, given Merry's recent experiences, maybe my longstanding crush on Windlass Records had cooled a little. "What about the MVC contract? MVC are absolutely fucking legendary. Slur, Radioshack, the Jesus Sugarpussy..."

"The Chums are on MVC now," Dieter sniffed.

"Come on, you can not seriously still be sore that they wouldn't shag you in the bathroom of the Lacuna Lounge five fucking years ago?" I teased. Dieter just gave me the finger. That had to sting. Now he was finally famous enough to pull a Charm, no girl with internet access would touch him. Linda's revenge seemed to be complete. "Come on, give me the contracts and the phone numbers, I'll ring round next week."

"Have you forgotten you're going to Dallas for Dick's wedding next week?" Taylor reminded me.

"Shit." I had forgotten, too, even though Merry had booked the flights and a nice hotel, and was quite excited about the idea of a holiday somewhere warm. "Are you guys going?"

Dieter shook his head. "Can't. I'm DJing in London. I've already given the happy couple my regrets, and a rare Studio One dubplate as a wedding gift."

I rolled my eyes and looked over at Doyle, who wouldn't meet my gaze. "Come on, man, it's Dick's _wedding_ ," I insisted. "Don't you want us to go to your wedding when you get hitched?"

"I'd go, but... come on. Dick and Clara do my head in with all that Alcoholics Anonymous stuff they're into. I can't hack it. Fucking 12-steppers. Always giving me shit about owning a bar, like, what the fuck else am I supposed to do with my money? It's my money, it's my business. I'll buy a bar if I want to; I did not just do it to fuck off Dick." 

"You really bought a bar," I repeated. I thought it was just some random bullshit that PCPete had made up.

Doyle shrugged lightly. "OK, so I went on a little binge in Brooklyn a while back, and when I woke up, I'd bought a bar. Shit happens."

"Doyle, when I go on a little drinking binge, I wake up and maybe I've bought some embarrassing Spice Girls albums. You bought... a _bar_? In _Brooklyn_?"

"Worked out cheaper in the end." Doyle smiled apologetically. I just glared at him. "And who cares if Dick and Clara don't come to my wedding, Auntie Beast never wants to get married anyway."

"Auntie Beast?" I practically exploded. "You've hooked up with her again? Are you fucking kidding me? After what she did to your and Dieter's flat?" Suddenly I panicked. "Are you fucking using again, Doyle? Look at me!"

Finally, Doyle raised his eyes and stared me full in the face. His eyes were troubled, but his pupils were normal. "Don't fucking start on me. She had to split town after getting rumbled by the cops. They left the door off its hinges after a raid and that's when the junkies moved in. Auntie Beast went to Phoenix to get clean. We're both clean. How the fuck else do you think I know about prescription names for Methadone?"

I stared at my friend. Without the attraction of heroin, what the fuck did he see in that woman? "Better fucking stay that way."

Doyle said nothing, but looked down at the carpet again, his face quietly seething.

"OK, well, then I'm going to Dallas next week, by myself," I finally announced. "Does anyone else wanna call the record companies to talk to A&R?" Silence filled the room. "Yeah, I didn't fucking think so," I muttered under my breath, then went home to pack.

\----------

 

I did not even realise how much I had needed a vacation until Merry and I were on a plane. Both of us were distracted, uptight, but though we held hands at takeoff, I noted she did not offer me another mid-air blow job. Did she just not fancy me any more? Panic gripped me at the thought. I turned to observe her in the dim cabin light, and thought about how she had changed over the years. After years of quitting and then starting again, she had finally given up smoking for good after getting off tour for the last time, and her skin looked clear and rosy. Her eyes looked brighter, and now she had put on a bit of weight, I thought her cheeks looked adorably full, the dimples reappearing when she smiled. I had got so used to looking at photographs of her that I forgot sometimes she was a living, breathing, changing human being. It was admittedly still odd to have her around all the time, a warm body in my bed, an extra person in my apartment, surprised by bumping into her as a flesh and blood person instead of by glimpses her on MTV or in magazines. Was I starting to take her for granted, now that we lived together 24/7? Was familiarity breeding... well, if not contempt, but a distinct lack of mid-air blow-jobs? Should I say something? Yeah, I probably should, but to reassure my gorgeous girlfriend of my continued devotion, rather than look as if I were fishing too obviously for mid-flight shenanigans.

"Merry," I said quietly, distracting her from fussing over the dearth of vegetarian options in the in-flight menu. "You're gorgeous. You know that, right?"

"What?" She just looked confused, then blushed when she saw the look in my eye.

"You know you're still the most beautiful woman I've ever seen." Reaching down, I picked up her hand and raised it to my lips, kissing her knuckles gently.

"Are you drunk already, my love?" she laughed, reaching out to flick the tip of my nose. The very familiarity of the gesture reassured me of her devotion; she always said my nose was one of my best features, but I knitted my hands over the top of my head so she couldn't pull any curls out of my still immaculate hair.

"Drunk on love," I replied, feeling relaxation finally coursing through my body as I stretched out.

"If you start making noises about wanting to get married again, because we're going to a wedding..."

"Come on." I grinned at her. "It's not like either of us have a tour coming up that we have to hurry back for..." And as I said it, I realised for the first time in about 3 or 4 years it was actually true.

She grinned hesitantly and bit her lip, looking back at me coquettishly from under long blonde lashes. And then she somehow found a curl at the nape of my neck and worked it out, twirling it round her finger. I bent my head to rub my cheek against her hand. "Maybe. We can think about it."

 _Maybe_? I could work with maybe.

Dick's wedding was beautiful, I had to admit. It wasn't held in Dallas or Forth Worth proper, but out on a ranch in the country, with rolling plains and grazing horses as far as the eye could see. Dick glowed with happiness in his new, blue wedding suit, his hair freshly cut and the trilby banished by his wife's better taste. Clara looked gorgeous, in a 1920s style flapper dress, and for a moment I worried that Merry and I might have competition for the best dressed couple in the group. But then again, wasn't every woman at her most beautiful on her wedding day? I'd allow it. And even though it was a bit weird to go to a wedding with no booze, not even champagne, the rituals were calming, cutting the cake, tossing the bouquet (though I noted Merry went to great pains to avoid it) and the inevitable first dance, to _Wedding Cake Blues_ by Mexican Summers, of course. I was secretly really rather pleased that they'd proved Jeanette Flores wrong, all along. Love could survive, even in this business.

"Come on, I aimed that bouquet right at you, Merry," Clara teased later, at the big party under a marquee. There was a DJ playing lots of old 50s soul and rockabilly and even bits of Motown, and I was after my girlfriend to dance. "You two are so next."

"I hope so," I said, kissing the bride messily on the side of the face so as not to smear her cupid's bow lipstick. "Two Metropolis marriages in a month would be pretty sweet."

Merry made an embarrassed face, rolled her eyes and pulled me to my feet, dragging me off into the crowd. As we swung one another back and forth and round and round, I wondered when we had stopped dancing. It was one of the things I'd loved about her, back when we'd first started dating, how whenever we went to Garage Rage or a Northern Soul night, she was always the first person on the dance floor and the last person to leave, always begging the DJ for one more song.

Dick and Clara had left for their honeymoon, so the liquor had started surreptitiously flowing, and I was feeling frisky. Catching my girlfriend around the waist and holding her against me as we ground our hips back and forth, I rested my forehead against hers and gazed at her with what I hoped was a seductive grin. "Are we going to dance all night, or how soon can I persuade you to go back to the hotel?"

"If you want a quickie, we can go behind the cowshed, because I am for dancing all night," she teased. I took her at her word and took her behind the stables, my arms around her waist as I pushed into her from behind. There was no question of a condom, but I didn't even mention the idea that if she got pregnant, she would have to marry me. After all, we were at a wedding, and she had said _maybe_. Two fumbling orgasms later, first hers and then mine, and we were back on the dance floor, a tiny dribble of my cum running down her leg until I surreptitiously wiped it away with a filthy leer at her. That was how I liked her best, really, sweaty and dirty and marked with my scent.

We hired a car, and drove to Austin the next day, staying at a fabulous old art deco motel with a pool where we lounged late in the day, sipping at margaritas. In the evening, when the air cooled, we went out, checking out the local music scene. Austin was so much friendlier and more relaxed than New York, and I found myself falling in love with unfamiliar artists twice a night, chatting to guitarists from new bands with genuine enthusiasm. Why couldn't it be like this in New York, people just genuinely sharing their passion for music they loved, instead of that constant, hysterical desire to _make it_? I bought a couple of demo CDs, but made no promises, and people just seemed happy that their stuff was getting heard.

"I'm so sorry," I apologised to Merry as we stood watching an all girl country punk band in matching red polka-dot dresses and Rickenbackers. "This is a bit of a busman's holiday, isn't it?"

"Are you kidding me?" She turned to me with genuine pleasure I hadn't seen on her face in months, snaking her arm around my neck and kissing me softly on the lobe of my ear. "I am enjoying this so much. Listening to new music with you is one of my favourite things in the world. I love watching you get so excited. You always make me hear things in music that I miss. Why don't we do this more, at home?"

"Why indeed?" Sipping my drink, I wondered if I could get a demo off the band and slip it to Gerry. Wait, no. Maybe that was why we didn't do this more at home? It was fun when we were on holiday and enjoying ourselves, dancing and just being moved by the emotional pull of the music. It was not fun when it felt like a job. "When we get back to New York, you and me, we are going to go dancing, at least once a week," I solemnly intoned. She laughed and clinked her bottle of Corona against mine.

I stayed true to that promise, at least for the first month or so. Even when I was arguing with record companies during the daytime, trying to balance three competing sets of negotiations, I still left the cell phone at home when Merry told me it was dance night. We tried to alternate musical styles, house and techno one week, and then 60s R&B and Motown the next, but it was still good old fashioned rock'n'roll that really got me going. My guiltiest pleasure was when the pair of us dressed unrecognisably down in jeans and sweaters, my hair curly, hers up in a ponytail, and we went down to Trash Rock at an embarrassingly terrible bar on St Mark's Place, unironically tossing ourselves about to AC/DC or The Ramones.

We spent Christmas up in Massachusetts with Meredith and the corgis - and boy did it ever feel really weird to be sleeping together up at her Mum's house, like, too weirded out to even fool around on Christmas morning. But Meredith and her noisy bustle, well, she just felt like _family_ now. Meredith and Merry didn't even bother toning down their high-volume arguments around me any more; I just made them cups of tea and let them get on with it. In fact, the day that Meredith tried to drag me in on her side, over some obscure argument about Yule Logs and Paganism, I realised I had actually been accepted as a son-in-law.

Then we drove back down to NYC for New Year's, to see in 2001 with a massive party at Doyle's bar in BillyBurg, as all of our friends, who had been steadily priced out of the East Village seemed to be re-congregating on the other side of the East River. Four years. In January 2001, Merry and I would have been together for four years, I thought to myself as we chucked ourselves about to Doyle's slightly incompetent DJ-ing, then collapsed, exhausted, in a sweaty heap, shortly after midnight. Both of us would turn 29 this year, Merry only a few weeks ahead of me, and perhaps we were getting a bit old for all-night parties.

It was funny, how love ebbed and flowed over the course of the years. But then again, we had never really had one of those standard move-in-together and spend-all-their-time-cohabiting relationships, had we? In four years, the amount of time we had actually spent as a living-together couple, in the same city, at the same time, sharing a bed every night... it was unlikely we'd spent 365 nights sleeping in the same room. In fact, this was the longest period of time we had spent properly cohabiting since we had got together. It was still exciting to me, I still thrilled to wake up and see her lying next to me, still felt an odd frisson when she neglected to lock the bathroom door and I walked in on her on the toilet. The idea that we could just... hang out. That we could just wake up and find ourselves together for the day with nothing to do, instead of having to schedule phone calls and having to wait for email replies across hours worth of time zones? I almost didn't know how to handle it. It felt like some undeserved luxury that I would never quite get used to.

The idea that I could just get home from a meeting with MVC in the middle of the day, and walk in and find her sitting on our bed, playing my guitar, and that I could just have sex with her, there and then without having to schedule it with our managers six weeks in advance... Maybe I went a little bit nuts. Sitting down at her feet, I started to pull her tights off, kissing her feet and then working my lips slowly up the inside of her calves, licking at the backs of her knees before moving up her thighs.

"Come on, Danny, I can't play if you do that. I've nearly got this riff worked out..."

"It'll make your riff better. We can make like David Bowie and Mick Ronson." I was answered by a tiny fragment of Ziggy Stardust as I pushed her dress up out of the way then pulled her panties off her hips. Parting her legs, I looked down at her sex, running my fingers up between her outer lips, watching her grow slick as I parted her lips and peered inside. Slowly, tentatively, as she still fiddled with the guitar, I flicked my tongue against her, teasing her that I was going to push inside her, only to pull back at the last moment, and lie back, just staring at her pussy with the abject joy of a teenage boy.

"Put that back," she whimpered, and I torturously extended my middle finger and pushed it up inside her, remembering how I'd dreamed of doing this while recording my own guitar solos. Bending down, I let my tongue slide across her clitoris, and she cried aloud, the guitar riff skittering off. The taste of her, the smell of her sex, it drove me ever so slightly wild, and I felt myself getting hard. I pushed my index finger in beside the first, and spread her wider as if trying to see inside her. If I could have, at that moment I would have pushed my whole body inside her fanny, crawled up inside her to lick her from within. But instead I bent down and applied my tongue more persistently to her clit, as her legs tensed and she curled her toes, wrapping her knees around my neck. She lost her grasp on the guitar, and let it fall, I heard the strings ring out as she reached down and tangled her fingers in my hair instead, holding my head in place as I lapped against her, pushing my hand into her in time with her heartbeat, feeling her wrapping herself around my fingers, her flesh sucking at me like a mouth.

And with the back of my mind, I heard the guitar stop ringing. There was a moment of near total silence, except for the excited catch of breath in Merry's throat as I heard her approaching orgasm. And then someone else started playing the guitar. For a second, it just didn't make sense, but then I felt Merry tense.

I raised my head, startled, and turned to see Doyle standing there, staring down at us with a mildly interested expression on his face. For a split second, Doyle's gaze followed my arm, tilting his head as he tried to peer between Merry's legs, as if looking into that gaping lacuna that my fingers were still holding open. Then abruptly, Merry shrieked aloud, and grabbed our comforter, sweeping it across both of us.

"How long have you been standing there?" I demanded, furious, freeing my head from the blankets. Merry had twisted away from me, and it took me a moment to extract my hand from inside her. For a second, I looked around for something to wipe it on, then gave up and thrust my fingers into my mouth, licking them clean as if to make up for the pleasure I had just been denied.

"Not long." Doyle was still smiling placidly.

"How the fuck did you get in here?" I looked over to see that Merry had now wrapped the comforter around her, pulling it up to her chest, even though she was still fully clothed from the waist up.

"Dude, you left the door unlocked."

"You could have knocked."

"I did... most people are not _at it_ at 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon." He was still staring at Merry in a way that was making both of us uncomfortable, as Merry climbed off the bed, the comforter wrapped around her, and trotted back towards the bathroom, shooting daggers at Doyle as she passed him. Doyle didn't even appear to notice, his heavily-lidded eyes following her with detached, unemotional interest. Raising his arm, Doyle scratched the back of his neck lazily, and I suddenly didn't like that lazy slowness.

"Doyle, are you high?" I asked abruptly, standing up and taking my guitar back from him.

"I'm not high," Doyle laughed, even as I leant in to check his pupils. "OK, maybe a little." He giggled girlishly. "Nothing for you to worry about."

"What are you doing here anyway?" Walking over to the kitchen, I dug in the fridge for an open bottle of wine while waiting for my erection to go down. Fucking Doyle, I'd be balls-deep in my missus by now if it weren't for the interruption.

"I wanted to know how the meeting with MVC went. We have a third album to start work on, once you decide what label to bless with your presence."

" _Our_ presence," I corrected. It seemed like Doyle no longer wanted to acknowledge ownership of anything in his life. "And the meeting with MVC went fine. You'd have known if you were there, if it's not too much to pry you away from the Williamsburg drugs scene." Doyle merely shrugged and helped himself to his own glass of wine. It annoyed me how he seemed to feel so entitled to my apartment, to my wine... and to gawk at my half-naked girlfriend. "We have convinced them that Dieter does not have AIDS and might survive to make at least 2 more albums."

"Not a four album deal, then. We're only worth half of two Rocket Pops and a Motivator?"

"I don't know that we want to commit to a four album deal. I feel kinda like MVC have to prove their worth to us, rather than the other way around."

"You'd really rather stay on Musketeer, wouldn't you?" Doyle's lazy smile unnerved me.

"I'd really rather be the biggest band on the fucking planet, if that's alright with you. And I think MVC have a greater chance of putting us there."

"So we're signing with MVC."

"Looks like it."

As silence fell between us, Merry reappeared from the bathroom, now wearing a dress on top of a pair of jeans, as if she wanted more layers of clothing between Doyle's eyes and herself. "Hello, Merry, nice to see you, too," Doyle quipped, but she glared at him.

"Fuck you, Doyle."

"Ow! What? As if I couldn't have just gone up to Benningon's four years ago, and seen it for myself?" he teased, and I felt a growl building inside me. He just had to rub it in, didn't he, that he had known about Merry's past way before I had?

Merry stopped and just fixed him with an expression of utter disgust. "When did you turn into Dieter?" Doyle's face suddenly collapsed, as if Merry had scored a palpable hit on his ego, and the pair of them just glared at one another for a moment. "I'm... going out. We need milk and... I'm desperately craving some fresh squeezed orange juice. If you two want dinner... _eat out_ ," she snapped, then seized another layer of winter coat before heading for the stairs.

Merry was in a bad mood for days, fractious and mercurial, sulking for reasons that seemed to go way beyond the perceived violation by Doyle. She moped and hung about the fridge, staring moodily into it, though she didn't want to eat, and she said the smell of wine made her feel sick. Rubbing her back sullenly, she complained that her feet hurt, and though I did the best I could, sitting her down next to me, her feet in my lap as I rubbed them, she seemed just constantly out of sorts with me. Was this just what it was going to be like, if we lived together all the time? Suddenly, completely uncharitably, I found myself wondering how quickly Metropolis could finish the next album and get back out on the road again, with no interruptions by moody females.

The MVC thing was taking forever. I had forgotten how slowly major labels could move. Dealing with Gerry was quick and easy, with only one, maybe two layers at the most to get through before a decision was made. But every single thing MVC did had to be agreed in triplicate with half a dozen different departments. In theory, they agreed to buy out Musketeer's interest in Metropolis, but they wanted a contract that said exactly how much Musketeer had valued us at based on projected album sales, and of course such a document didn't actually exist. Gerry and I had to futz one together based on our album sales for _Semantics_. Jesus Christ, with a couple of repressings, _Semantics_ had sold twice over what I had thought it had sold, and I found myself momentarily wondering why we were leaving. But Gerry was nice about it, saying he understood, and though he was sad to see us go, he did wish us the best of luck. (Though, honestly, I think he might have been slightly relieved not to have me dropping in and interrogating him over advertising budgets and radio coverage any more.)

But MVC dragged on and on. There were just so many endless phone calls, to the main office in London, to the branch office in LA - for a terrible few days, I thought we were all actually going to have to fly out to London and to go through the whole damn process all over again, but eventually London said they were happy to let LA handle it. Still, LA. Who wanted to go to LA? I shouted over to Merry wondering if she fancied a quick jaunt to LA with me, but she mumbled something into a pint of ice cream about not wanting to leave the house. A pint of ice cream? In February? My girlfriend was insane. But still not as insane as the idea of flying the four members of Metropolis out to LA to sign a contract in person instead of just putting it in the post.

So the four of us flew out to LA, signed the deal in the infamous MVC building on Ocean Way Boulevard, and then flew back the next day, to begin negotiations for starting the album. I wanted us to go into the studio with Barry Michaels, I wanted the whole nine yards, the residential studio with the Norwegian fireplace and the floating recording console. But MVC had not approved Barry Michaels, and so Barry had to submit a proposal and a projected invoice, and though Barry had certainly had experience with dealing with that sort of demand, he wasn't very quick at actually fulfilling it.

Merry was being fucking weird. She complained constantly about the cold, putting on more and more layers, but if I dared turn the thermostat up, she'd complain she was dying of dehydration. For a week she refused to eat anything but this odd Chinese cabbage soup from a dodgy smelling restaurant down on Canal Street, and I fretted about the return of her eating disorder. But there wasn't much I could do about it, as I needed to get upstate to sit down with Barry Michaels and have a preproduction production meeting, whatever the hell that was. I kissed her and told her I dawed her, and left her sitting up in bed, rubbing her own aching feet and bawling with tears at my desertion. Merry, who had disappeared off onto 6-month tours without so much as a backwards glance. That girl needed a new band, or she was going to drive me insane.

The Preproduction Production Meeting turned out to be that very exact thing that my bandmates had never let me indulge in before. Barry sat us down around the Norwegian wood fire, and got us to list out all the songs that we wanted to work on recording, and then had each of us write down three words or phrases or colours or images that we associated with that song, and how we wanted it to turn out. I really loved that exercise, and even more, I enjoyed it when Barry collected our papers, and read them out as if it were a class, and he was giving marks for creativity. 

Dieter, however, thought the whole thing was completely pointless, and told us all so, often. Dieter was not in a good place, and hadn't been since the whole AIDS scare. He had successfully quit coke cold turkey - helped by the fact that he was still personna non grata on the Scene - but he compensated by chain-smoking his way through over two or more packs of cigarettes a day. His health was not good, and as he hacked away with that smoker's cough, I took him aside and asked if he had had that second AIDS test. It was _fine_ , Dieter insisted. He was completely free of HIV and had the papers to prove it, Taylor had insisted on that for the MVC contract.

The problem had actually been the chlamydia. He'd had one round of antibiotics for it, and when that had failed to shift it, they'd tried a stronger course. That had eventually cleaned up the infection, but it had destroyed the natural flora and fauna of his digestive tract. He'd been suffering from irritable digestion for months now, and had completely given up all forms of gluten in order to try and get his bowels back into balance. It did appear to be working, but without bread or pasta to bulk up on, he was losing a lot of weight.

Now Dieter was so tall and angular that he actually looked good that thin. It suited him, bringing out a new sharpness to his devilish cheekbones. There was more than a touch of Thin White Duke to his style now. But it was not going to help the AIDS rumours.

Dieter merely grinned fiendishly, and for a moment, it looked like the old Dieter was back. "Why, that's my new image, don't cha know. AIDS patient chic. If I have to put up with this fucking rumour hanging round my neck like an albatross, y'know, that's my revenge. Make those fuckers want to fuck me _even as an AIDS patient_."

I recoiled slightly. Although I was happy to see the spark back in Dieter's eye, and to see him smiling again, the ruthlessness with which he spoke frightened me a bit. But then I suddenly saw through Dieter's schtick, and realised exactly what it had been, all those years. The broken teeth that he had flaunted to highlight his 'rough trade' appeal. The half-Jewish kid in the nazi uniform, playing on people's own anti-semitism to make them _fancy him anyway_. Dieter knew what he was doing; Dieter always knew exactly what he was doing.

Despite Dieter's doubts, the Preproduction Production meeting had actually filled me with confidence, and convinced me that working with Barry was absolutely the right choice to have made. Our third album was going to be our finest hour yet, I could feel it. And with the marketing might of MVC behind it, surely that would launch Metropolis over the top into superstardom. Though, oddly, no one else in my band seemed quite so keen on the idea of superstardom as I was, as we mulled it over in the van ride back down to New York. Dick and Doyle were making noises about wanting to spend time with wives and girlfriends, instead of getting back into the album-tour-album-tour saddle with MVC. I thought they were insane. At that point, it felt like touring kept me grounded. I couldn't imagine what else I would do to keep busy.

When I got back to our flat, my girlfriend had actually gone insane from being out of work. There, that proved that not touring was bad for a musician's mental health. The entire place had been turned upside down, all of the furniture moved around, the bed moved to the front, right up by the windows, and a makeshift wall erected from a row of bookshelves, subdividing the space up into two rooms, and completely destroying the sense of pure, open airiness in the loft.

"Merry, what the hell have you been doing?" I exploded, walking around from one side of the bookshelf unit to the other, wondering if I would have to take the books and the records and Merry's comic book collection out of it before moving it backwards against the wall to free up the area again.

"I was just trying to get some... privacy," Merry sulked, hanging back and refusing to help as I tried my shoulder against the shelves and found they wouldn't budge.

"What, because I left the door unlocked _once_ , and Doyle walked in on us screwing?" I huffed, taking off my blazer and rolling up my shirt sleeves to tackle the unwanted furniture.

"No, because... Because, do I live here or don't I? Is this my home, too, or is it just yours? Am I allowed to stamp my personality on this apartment, or do I just have to... fit in around the corners of your shit?"

" _What_?" I dropped my arms from the side of the unit. How on earth had one skinny woman managed to manoeuvre all of this stuff into place? "How can you...?" I glared at the huge, ugly, black blocks of the bookshelves, then back at my girlfriend. "You know, next time you decide to take up home improvement, can you just _ask_ me first? Or better yet, go start your own band again, and stop messing about with my things!"

As soon as I said it, I knew it was too far. Merry's face crumpled, and she burst into tears as she disappeared round the other side of the shelves. Since when had my girlfriend been such a cryer? This was not like Merry. Merry was an arguer, a disapproving glancer, a silent but meaningful glarer, but this crying thing was completely out of character.

"Merry?" Cautiously, I stuck my head around to make sure no objects would be thrown at me, then followed with my body when I saw her collapsed on the bed, sobbing. "Merry, I'm so sorry. I just snapped. I wasn't thinking, it was just a surprise, is all." I sat down on the side of the bed, and put my hand tentatively on her heaving shoulders.

"No, you're right." Suddenly flopping over on the bed, she wrapped her arms around my waist, and buried her face in my lap. Since when had Merry just given up without a fight, and flip-flopped her mood around like this? "You're completely right. I'm just... it's like I haven't been myself lately. There's just something wrong with me and I don't know what it is. I thought maybe putting up some damn shelves would make me feel more comfortable, make me feel... _righter_. But you're right. It's not the flat, it's not the shelves. It's just me. I'm lost, I'm at a loose end, and I don't know what to do with myself. I have no idea who I am any more."

I was taken by surprise, completely unprepared for this speech, unprepared to find my beautiful, confident girlfriend turned into this sudden crying sodden mess on my trousers. "Merry..." Laying my hand on her back, I bent down and kissed the top of her head carefully, then smoothed her hair. "I did not mean to upset you. If you feel like... like you're not welcome here, I'm sorry. You're right. It's your space, too. It is your home. You need to do what you need to feel comfortable here."

Abruptly, she stopped sobbing, and looked up at me. "Did you even hear me?"

"I heard you, but you are taking this way out of proportion..."

"I'm not. You're absolutely right. You're about to disappear into the studio with Barry for three months, aren't you? I know how Barry likes to hothouse people, likes to shut out the outside world. I need to find something to do with myself while you're away or I'm going to go mad."

 _I think you've already gone mad_ , I thought to myself, but knew better than to say it aloud this time. Racking my brains, I had a sudden brainstorm. "You know... you and Gabe were a team, long before Elisha appeared on the scene. Have you spoken to Gabe recently?"

"I speak to him most days. He has email now, but he's gone back to England. He's got a British girlfriend now, you know."

So much for that idea, I mused, then started to play with her hair, pulling my fingers through it as I pushed it back from her forehead. God, I loved her hair. I'd never fancied blondes before I met Merry, but now that butter-coloured hair with the paler wheat-blonde streaks by her temples, the way it came in darker underneath and bleached out in the sunlight, it was a source of endless fascination. "I guess you do need a new band, then."

"Perhaps I do." And as suddenly as the foul mood had arrived, it seemed to depart, and Merry was leaping up and walking to the kitchen and heating up that awful hot and sour tofu soup for dinner again. Women! They were all categorically insane, and I could not wait to get back to the all-male sanctum of the studio again.

And so I packed up my clothes, and then my guitars and my pedals and my amplifiers, and took Merry's ebow again without asking. Then I said goodbye to her, and loaded it all into the back of Metropolis' van, headed for Catskills Mansions. We'd parked it up in front of my loft again, waiting for the rest of the band to arrive as I piled guitars and amplifiers in the back. But I stopped when I saw Auntie Beast canoodling in the front seat with Doyle.

"No," I said, quite simply, walking around to the front and opening the door, waiting for her to get out.

"What do you mean, no?" asked Doyle flatly.

"No, I mean, we're going up there to work. She is only going to be a distraction. Not to mention that wherever that woman goes, drugs follow, and I am not going to expose Dick to that. I mean no."

"You know, I'm right here," Auntie Beast protested, fixing me with an evil glare.

"And you're staying _right here_. Look, I'm sorry love, but not even Merry is coming to the studio this time."

"Merry was in the studio with us during _Lights! Camera! Action!_ and during the _Impediment_ EP" Doyle pointed out.

"For a start, Merry played on the _Impediment_ EP And she was in the studio for one day - not even a day - just one evening when we were doing _Lights! Camera! Action!_ This is not the same thing at all. I'm serious, Doyle, this is not on."

"Look, forget it," shrugged Auntie Beast, finally giving up and climbing down out of the van's cab. "I was only going to come up for the weekend to get you settled, but if Danny Fascist-ton is going to blow a gasket, I won't bother."

"Ooh Danny Fascist-ton, that's a good one, isn't it, goes well with A-Dieter Hitler, doesn't it," I snorted, completely unimpressed, but still relieved that she had given up without too much of a fight.

Doyle still looked immensely pissed off. "If she can't come, then I do not want to see hide nor hair of Merry while we are up there."

"Trust me, I don't want you seeing any more of Merry than you already have," I snapped. For fucks sake, we weren't even in the studio yet, and we were already at each other's throats? It could only get worse when Dieter and Dick arrived.

But Auntie Beast was looking at Doyle very strangely. "What do you mean, see more of Merry than you already have."

Now Doyle managed to look suitably embarrassed. "I accidentally walked in on them shagging the other week. Caught way more of an eyeful of Merry's honeyed cunny than loverboy here was comfortable with."

It took every ounce of self control I possessed not to pull a Dick and launch myself at Doyle's throat, but Auntie Beast was half glaring, half sneering. " _Honeyed cunny_? You really are in love with her, aren't you." And with that, she grinned triumphantly, shouldered her large bag and shuffled off away down the street.

I felt my head start spinning, fighting off the urge to hyperventilate, just staring at Doyle with huge eyes, wide with fear and jealousy. And Doyle suddenly snapped to, realising what had just transpired. "Wait... Dan, no. I am _not_ in love with Merry. That's absurd! Can't you see...? She just dropped that to rattle you. She wants to get back at you for not letting her come along and..."

Just as I was about to open my mouth and say something I probably would have come to regret, a cab pulled up next to the van, and Dick emerged, paying the driver before starting to unload bits and pieces of his kit. Doyle and I both leapt to help him, but there was a heavy silence between us, and I avoided Doyle for the rest of the afternoon. And finally, Dieter appeared, strolling up the street towards us, smoking furiously, bass slung casually over one shoulder. He tossed the case lightly into the back, climbed into an empty seat and stretched his long, skinny frame out, and we were ready to go.


	37. I've Got Two Angles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Metropolis retire to Catskills Mansions to start work on their third album with super-producer Barry Michaels, the whole band are exhausted, fractious and at each other's throats.
> 
> Dieter is furious at being dragged away from NYC, and totally disillusioned with the downsides of celebrity. Doyle is constantly fighting with Dieter. Dick hates the cold, upstate weather. And Daniel is feeling the pressure of perfection.
> 
> When the boys, left to their own devices for the evening, gather to watch the sexually charged film, _Performance_ , friendly ribbing about each other's sexuality turns into something more vicious and unsettling.
> 
> Content warning for homophobia, and for transphobia.

I found it hard to believe, the dream come true, that Metropolis were ensconced for the long haul in the farmhouse up at Catskills Mansions. I had insisted on having the same bedroom as Merry had once had, feeling that it would be good luck to sleep on the same pillows where she'd once dreamed. But the band arrived fractious and bad-tempered, burned out from too much touring and all slightly pissed off with one another for a myriad interconnected reasons. I lay back and waited for the house and its grounds to start to slowly work its magic on my band, even as we wrestled with the ugly, angry, jaded sounding songs that Doyle and I had written while on the endless Semantics tour.

Doyle fell instantly in love with the grounds, and rose early to go trail-running, or even cross country skiing once or twice when there had been a fresh snowfall overnight. Dick complained about the cold, and spent most of the time that he was not drumming shovelling wood or coal onto the various fireplaces. Dieter, however, just would not settled down, at least not at first, like a cat who could not adjust to a new, unfamiliar home. And though I knew it was probably just that Dieter was still angry about the whole AIDS scare thing, his disillusionment seemed to have this corrosive effect on his entire worldview. Dieter had thought rural Connecticut was bad enough; he hated Upstate New York, and sulked constantly about the lack of culture or intellectual stimulation.

"But look at the view," I tried to tell him as we stood together in the cathedral loft of the main recording room, waiting for Dick to set up his drum kit. "Look at the mountains, look at the trees."

Dieter ignored the view and just glared at me as if everything were my fault. "I am an urban creature," he informed me. "With urban habits and urban needs. I do not want to see a mountain. I do not want to see a fucking tree outside of Central Park. I am personally aesthetically _offended_ by a view which comprises nothing more interesting than... than... a patch of fucking _grass_. Where is the mental stimulation? Where is the culture? These people's idea of culture is a violin string in a fucking bell jar. This place has _nothing_ for me."

The one time that I persuaded him to accompany me down to the Rainbow Mushroom cafe for a cup of vegan cappuccino and maybe a conversation with the outside world, Dieter made such a scene that he refused to even countenance going to the village again. Since I was long established as a semi-regular, I just nodded my greeting at the teenage boy at the counter and asked for a soy vegaccino with cinnamon and chocolate powder, and expected Dieter to do much the same.

But as Dieter stared up at the board, puzzling his way through the varieties of Rice Dream or Soy or Almond or Coconut milk, the young man started to actually physically shake, staring at Dieter with a mixture of awe and fear.

"I would like an almond milk latte... no, make that a flat white, with two sugars..." As Dieter spoke, the boy made a strange, strangled cry, but his mouth did not seem to be able to form words. "What's the matter, boy, are you having a fit?" Dieter drawled, with what had become characteristic spite, as I cringed and the boy stared.

"I... your band... I love you, man," the boy managed to get out. "No homo, honest, Dieter, but... holy fucking shit, I love your band."

Dieter stared at the lad as if he were something indelicate he'd found crusted on the underside of his Doc Martens. "My band."

"I'm a huge fan. I love Metropolis," the boy whispered, completely overwhelmed.

"Myself, I love coffee," Dieter spat. "Do you think you could manage to perform the task for which I am about to pay you?"

"Coffee," repeated the boy, as if not quite understanding what was he was doing in his own coffee shop. "Soy latte, and... I'm sorry... what?"

"Is there someone else who can take our order?" Dieter demanded, signalling to an older woman in the back, who looked unlikely to have even heard of Metropolis. "Soy vegaccino and an Almond Milk Flat White, if you please."

"Would you like our autographs?" I asked the boy patiently, embarrassed for Dieter, but nonetheless, I felt awfully sorry for the lad. The young man nodded even as he cringed behind his manager, and I produced the sharpie I had started to carry with me everywhere during the last tour, and wrote my name on a menu before passing it to Dieter and needling him sharply in the ribs to make sure he signed.

"If you'd like to take a seat, I'll bring them over to you," said the manager, and Dieter fled, looking about the room suspiciously for other threats, before settling in an isolated booth at the back, far from the windowseat that I preferred.

"Was it really necessary to behave like that," I said quietly, as I joined my bandmate.

"When I go to a restaurant, I expect to be served the same as any other paying customer, not treated like an animal in a zoo. It is an offence to my humanity to be gawked at like an object on display."

"He is, also, _our_ paying customer," I reminded him. "His devotion, and the devotion of others like him, is what is currently paying for us to be up here in this expensive studio."

"You have no idea what it's like, this Sudden Onset of Celebrity," Dieter snapped, but the manager emerged, and brought our coffees, so I smiled graciously and thanked her.

"I do know what it's like. But I also know that politeness costs nothing," I noted as I dug through the jumble of condiments. There was no cinnamon, though there was chocolate. I sprinkled it on. "I've been coming in here all week, and had nothing but pleasant conversations with that poor lad."

"No, Daniel, I don't think you _do_ know what it's like. You're not the one whose face, whose words, whose public health hazard status is out there in every single magazine every single day. You have some measure of anonymity, to go to coffeeshops and have pleasant conversations. And you have the protection of a relationship and a known partner to shield you from the worst of these... _no homo_ obsessions. Do you have any idea what it's like for me?"

"I bloody well do," I insisted. _Bloody well_? That was a Merry-ism. "I can't even go to the Lacuna Lounge any more without kids pestering me for my autograph or asking to take photos or trying to tell me about their band. But it's a sacrifice I'm prepared to make, for what we've got out of it."

"The Lacuna Lounge," sneered Dieter. "Have you completely taken leave of your senses, going there?" I just shrugged. "It's a shell of its former self, since Charlene sold it, a Disneyland version of the Lower East Side lifestyle for tourists. What were you expecting? But it's not just the Lacuna for me. I can't even go to a store to buy a pair of trousers without someone making comments about my style. I can't go to an art gallery for quiet contemplation without a stream of people coming over to speak to me and destroying my vibe. Bars, clubs? Forget it. It's like being hemmed in by a baying mob. Everybody seems to want something from me, even if it's just for the celebrity to acknowledge their existence. It's grotesque! I can't even go to the fucking bodega for a pack of cigarettes without some wag hectoring me about my HIV status. And until all of those things have happened to you, you have no right to lecture me on whether I have to be polite to some dolt who was too starstruck to put any sugar in my coffee." Reaching over to take 2 packets of raw sugar, Dieter ripped them open viciously and poured them into his drink.

I did not quite have the heart to remind Dieter that he had wanted this, that he had _asked_ for this. I distinctly remembered a scene at one of Z-Man's parties, where Dieter had mocked Merry for wanting to _give away_ her own celebrity status, when she was in the worst of it. But there was no point in telling him this, so we drank our coffee in silence, then made a swift exit before anyone else could notice the two rock stars drinking vegaccinos in a cafe in Upstate New York.

And while Dieter's black mood hung about the studio like bad weather, it seemed impossible to get any real work started. He sulked, he brooded, he made blatant and obvious mistakes that pulled Dick off his rhythm and screwed up the first few weeks' worth of sessions, and to top it all off, he complained endlessly about the food. I knew that Dieter was still having trouble with his digestion, but nothing excused the endless finicky complaints about what was and wasn't inedible.

But it was Cindy Birdweather who took great pains to try and pull him out of his foul moods, troubling herself to find out what kind of food he actually liked, and to prepare gluten-free versions of it. I had never realised that Dieter actually had an appreciation for any kind of food, and that he missed stodgy varieties of various Eastern European dumplings most of all. But Cindy did some searches on the internet, and discovered rare ancient breeds of grain, heritage spelt and rye, whose flour had far lower gluten content. She ordered them from the Rainbow Mushroom Co-op, and managed to create passable versions of some of Dieter's favourite childhood meals.

What was completely unexpected was how Dieter reacted. I had expected Dieter to greet her with his customary jaded sense of entitlement, and either snap at her as he had the child at the cafe, or else just ignore the fuss that she made over him as just somehow part of his birthright. But Dieter, astonishingly, over a bowl of low-gluten Matzoh-ball soup, responded with actual kindness, thanking her with a genuine consideration that seemed completely out of character. And with Dieter well-fed, and in a better mood, the sessions slowly started to inch forward.

I, myself, found it hard not to be overwhelmed with the _sound_ of Catskills Mansions, let alone the unconventional approach that Barry took to recording. Barry liked to have us _deconstruct_ songs, as he put it, though that term caused much eye-rolling and quips about Derrida from Dieter. But what Barry meant by deconstruct... well, it didn't really make sense. He would have us deliberately play songs vastly too fast or too slow, to see how it felt when we went back to the tempo we'd set. He would have one or two of us drop out - and play the song through with just bass, drums and vocals - or just lead guitar and bass - to see if it made the song 'breathe' better. He would isolate a tiny section of a song and have us play it over and over, a dozen repetitions of a particular transition between verse and chorus with different timings. And every time we played, the tape op / sound engineer, Old Ken, would wander about, placing mics, removing mics, repositioning mics, to see what captured the best sound. There seemed to be nothing that he and Old Ken would not try to get the perfect take.

At first, it was hard for us to really get a grip on the sense of freedom, of spaciousness, of being able to take as long as we needed on any given trick. But on another level, this was a trap. In Connecticut, the spectre of time had always been breathing down our necks, and too many times, I had settled for a take that wasn't perfect, but would do, to be honed into shape with a little magic in the mixing process. But at Catskills Mansions, time was eternal and money was no object.

Barry made me play my guitar takes over, and over, and over again, until my patience snapped. "But that was fine," I insisted, after the thirteenth take.

"It wasn't, you were behind the beat coming down from the D to C sharp on the pre-chorus," Barry replied calmly. "Try it again."

I played it again, but Barry shook his head. "What was wrong with it that time?"

"You've gone out of tune, please can you check your B string."

I retuned my guitar and tried it again. Another shake of the head. "What now."

"Crackle on the line, I'm just going to check the grounding on your amp. Might move it to another power supply. Yup, look at the flicker in the light on that power supply. Ken, have you got a circuit breaker anywhere?" Ken appeared, carrying a large piece of electrical kit. "Thanks. OK, we're just moving you over now, to another line with a noise reduction circuit on it. Much better, but we're going to have to wait for your amp to warm up again. Might want to retune while you're at it; that 330 of yours really does not hold its tuning, does it?"

"My 330 was fine in Connecticut," I muttered under my breath, stretching and folding my arms above my head, but I re-tuned anyway, and played the riff one more time. "No, come on, Barry, what was wrong with that?"

"You're still late, coming down from the D to the C sharp. Don't wait for Dieter, he's holding a pedal point on the bass; you move when you hear the drums go."

"For fucks sake," I swore. "Can you not just whack it into Alsihad and fix it in the mix?"

Barry looked aghast, as if he'd just been asked to cook his firstborn and eat it with artisanal seasalt and a dash of truffle oil. "No, Daniel, I run a digital-free shop here. And if you even think of asking for autotune, I will politely ask you to get a new producer. Please just play the riff again."

After four full days of trying to capture the archetypical take of one of our trickier songs, I called a band meeting and asked if we could please just reinstate the 3-take rule. There might not be the pressure of time and money, though I was certainly aware of the pressure of major label expectations to deliver the _perfect_ record, but after the 42nd take of one guitar riff, I had reached my limit.

But after breakfast, Barry took me aside, and fixed me with a semi-paternal expression. "I know you're impatient," he soothed. "You're exactly the same as Merry, attention span of a child, you want to be on to the next thing already. But perfect takes time. And I'm going to say exactly the same thing that I said to Merry."

"What did you say to Merry?" I demanded, feeling suddenly not so much territorial, as vaguely diminished at being compared to my damn girlfriend.

"I asked her, to think of something that she found difficult. That she had to really work on, that she hadn't just got right off the bat, that she'd actually had to actually take time and get right. Think about that, Daniel, and then we'll talk about your 3-take rule."

I didn't want to think about my own answer to the question. "What did Merry say?"

Barry looked at me carefully. "Do you really want to know the answer to that."

"Of course I do," I snapped.

Sighing deeply, Barry looked straight into my eyes, and I knew I was being tested in some way. "The first time we had this conversation, she said her relationship with you. That she loved you with all her heart and all her soul, but that she found you inexplicable and confusing and frustrating and that she constantly struggled to make the relationship work."

I felt like I'd just been punched in the stomach. Staggering back to the kitchen table, I sat down. Merry had found me _difficult_? But I had constantly been bending myself out of shape and changing my language and trying to control my politically incorrect impulses whenever I was around her... And then I stopped feeling like the carpet had been yanked out from under me, and the lesson clicked. We both had to work at it. And working _did_ make things better, working at it did make us more able to deal with one another. Over the years, we had learned to live together, and match our immediate passion with a long-lasting companionship, until our differences had become a well of strength rather than a source of friction. "OK, I get it. What did you tell her when she said that?"

"Daniel, my boy, why do you think I sent her off to spend the weekends with you, each week?" His eyes twinkled as he said this, like a Californian Santa Claus.

"To teach her a lesson in compromise, or to make her appreciate her bandmates so much more by comparison," I quipped.

"To remind her that the stuff that's difficult is still the stuff that's most worth it." Barry clapped me on the shoulder and pulled me into a half-hug. "You could bring her up here for the weekend, if you like. It might be good for you, as well."

"I don't know if she'd be up for that," I hedged, remembering that if I asked Merry to come, that I opened the door to the appearance of Auntie Beast and her disruptive habits. I could not expose Dick to Auntie Beast; let alone Doyle, who, no matter how much he swore he and Beast had been into nothing stronger than pot, acted very differently when he was stoned on ganja in Upstate NY than he had back in the City.

"You could call her," Barry suggested. "I'll go over to the studio and start working on the track with just your rhythm section, see if they find it any easier."

I picked up the phone and dialled my own home, realising with an ache, how much I was anticipating just hearing her voice. But the answering machine picked up after the third ring, and my own voice told me "Hi, you have reached the Asheton / Wythenshawe residence. Please leave a message and whichever one of us you require will get back to you when we can."

"Hi, honey, it's me," I told my own self of a year ago, wondering how long it had been since I changed the message. "Barry has just given me the same little lecture he apparently once gave you about learning to be patient." I stopped myself before telling her how hard it was to swallow the lesson that I might be difficult to live with. "Ring me at the studio when you get this, or maybe I'll just send you an email."

I went upstairs and dug out my laptop, though honestly, I hadn't been using it as much as I expected - in fact, at all - and plugged that into the phone line instead, dialling onto the internet to check my email. And there, waiting for me in my inbox, was an email from Merry, dated two days earlier.

'Sweetie, I'm driving myself crazy just sitting around your loft staring at the walls. Gabe invited me to London to go hang out with him and his girlfriend in their fabulous new flat in Shoreditch, so I'm heading over... on the next flight. Tomorrow, as it turns out. Sorry this isn't a real goodbye. I know I should have called you, but this was such a last minute thing. And really, you were right. I need to do music again. I need to be in a band again. I don't feel myself without it. So I'm going back to England to look for my band, even if we have to find new a new keyboard player. DAW YOU FOR FUCKING EVER and don't forget it. M x'

I wrote back and said sorry for not getting back to her earlier, that I hadn't been checking the internet in the studio. 'I'll be in your band,' I offered, and surprised myself by realising I was actually halfway serious. "Do you need a guitar player?"

'Don't be stupid. As if you'd ever leave Metropolis' Merry wrote back. 'But thank you for being understanding x'

I wrote back and told her that I was genuinely pleased for her, that I thought it was the best news I'd had in months, and wished her good luck, then asked her to send my regards to Gabe. 

The next day was Saturday, so much to my surprise, there was no recording, in fact, Barry and Ken were off to Albany to get some repairs done on one of the busses for the board. I rounded everyone up into the studio anyway, to rehearse for a bit, work out some of the kinks of the trickier songs, but no one was much in the mood for work, and Doyle kept goofing off. He and Dick wouldn't stick to the songs as written, they'd come up with their own 'deconstructions' and go off and vamp into odd ska versions of the middle eight, or speed up into bizarre hardcore punk mosh-breaks before pretending to do a comedy lounge-core crooned version of the chorus. OK, that was actually kinda fun, to be honest, especially when Dieter and I switched instruments mid-song, and he shredded away on a ridiculous guitar solo while I totally jammed out with Dick on a killer psuedo-reggae dub bassline - but really, it was not helping us knuckle down to work. Still, though, it was the first time the four of us had been in a room together, laughing our heads off and smiling at once another since we got up to Catskills Mansions.

Just after sunset, Cindy stuck her head in the studio door. "Boys? I'm making pizza tonight. I figured we could all stay in for a movie night, but I'm taking orders for toppings. Any special requests?"

"Ham and pineapple!" called out Dick from behind the drumkit.

"Chorizo and hot pepper," Doyle countered.

"Pizza is not very fair to me, as I still can't do wheat or diary," Dieter whined, looking annoyed, but he brightened slightly when Cindy winked at him.

"I've already got a gluten-free base which I'll do up as bruschetta, with garlic and tomato sauce, and maybe some mussels? That sound good to you, Dee?"

"Delicious." He beamed back at her, pleased to have been remembered.

"Shellfish is hardly kosher, Dieter," Doyle teased.

"Fuck _off_."

"Can you make sure there is at least one vegetarian pizza? If that's not too much trouble?" I interjected, before Dieter and Doyle turned the whole pizza party into a meat feast.

"Already on it, Dan, I'm making the four cheese and olive pizza that was Merry's favourite, since both of you always seem to love the what the other one likes."

I smiled and hugged myself, feeling vaguely pleased. "We do always have the same taste - in food, clothes and records, at least."

We packed up our guitars for the evening and followed her through into the house, congregating round the DVD player, looking for films to watch. But immediately Dieter commandeered the remote and selected a disc. " _Performance_!" he said, in an awestruck tone. "This is my favourite film of all time, I think."

"I thought you said it was _Triumph of the Will_ ," Doyle pointed out, laughing at the vicious look that Dieter shot him.

"I only said that to wind up the left-wing British press," Dieter sighed long-sufferingly. "I do love the cinematography in _Triumph of the Will_ , but my favourite film is _Performance_."

"Oh, good! Put it on, then. It's one of my favourite films, too," Cindy called back from the kitchen.

"It's Merry's favourite film," I added rather quietly, suddenly missing her terribly. "She's always quoting that Anita Pallenberg line... You know the one..."

"He's a man, he's a male and female man," Cindy supplied from the kitchen, even as Dieter's ears perked up and he turned towards her. "Haven't you ever had a female feel?"

"I've got two angles," replied Dieter, his eyes suddenly brightening. "One male, and one female. Just like a triangle, see?"

"I must admit, I don't really get that bit," Doyle confessed, sinking into one of the easy chairs. "Anita Pallenberg is a beautiful woman, but all that gender bending shit she and Mick get up to is weird as hell." He pulled out rolling papers, then looked over at Dick. "Do you mind if we smoke a joint before dinner, are you OK with that?"

Dick shrugged and reached for his own cigarettes, picking up his own bottle of non-alcoholic root beer. "Nah, go ahead. But I do appreciate your asking." As the joint went round the room, he smoked his cigarette and concentrated on the film, staring at the startlingly sexual images with which the film opened. "Wow, OK, so I guess I should have known this was going to be a porno if Dieter was into it."

"it's not all like this," I pointed out, shifting uncomfortably. "It's a gangster film. At least, the first half of it is, until Anita Pallenberg appears and everything gets really weird." I took a drag of the joint then passed it on to Dieter. The pot was stronger than I was expecting, and was turning my head slightly, especially on an empty stomach. "Merry's made me watch it once or twice, but once they all take mushrooms, I completely lose the plot. I don't understand what's going on in the second half of the film at all." 

"You wouldn't, would you?" sneered Dieter.

"Fuck off," I grumbled, as I accepted a glass of wine from Cindy. She deposited a plate of olives on the coffee table in front of me, then curled up on the corner of Doyle's sofa, nearest the door, to wait as our pizzas cooked. "I have taken drugs before; I do know what an acid trip is. It's not that shit I don't understand, it's all the... freaky... identity swapping... shit. Like half the time it's Chas, and half the time it's Turner, I can never quite tell which is which."

Dieter hooted with laughter at my discomfort, then passed the joint across to Cindy.

"Don't get me wrong; I love this gangster bit at the beginning, though," I insisted. "Those clothes... those tailored 60s mod suits... Look at them! So sharp! Man, I totally aspire to dress like a 60s East End gangster."

As Chas flicked through his collection of cufflinks onscreen, Dick laughed and nodded at the screen. "OK, I can see the appeal of this film to Dan here. This is totally what your closet looks like, isn't it?" 

"Hot damn, in my dreams, yeah!"

"Now I know what to get you for your birthday." Leaning towards me, Dick clinked his bottle of root beer against my glass.

"The gangster bits are sooo boring," Doyle shrugged. "I always skip this bit of the film, and just fast forward until he goes to Notting Hill and Anita Pallenberg appears and the threesomes start, because holy shit, Mick Jagger and two chicks in bed, that is the fucking life, isn't it? Why are we even bothering watching the first half of the film? I don't even understand what's going on here with the trial and the gangsters."

"No! But this is the most important bit of the film," Dieter protested. "It's setting up the background atmosphere of this incredibly tough, hyper-masculine world of gangsters as an intensely homo-social, and actually quite homo-erotic environment, in counter to the highly feminised, yet beautifully pansexual world of Turner's mansion. I suppose you could draw many parallels between the all-male world of the gangsters, and the all-male atmosphere of the rock band. Of Metropolis, even, maybe." His cruel lips were turned up in a definite smirk as his eyes darted towards me. "So no wonder Daniel likes that aesthetic... along with the sharp suits and cufflinks."

"It's not homo-erotic," I sputtered. As Cindy turned to me in disbelief, Merry's words echoed in my head - _you are the gayest boy-thing I've ever dated_ \- and my face burned, as I wondered if she and Cindy had watched this film together, and maybe even discussed me, before that first weekend visit up at Catskills Mansions, all those years ago. "There is nothing homo-erotic about Metropolis, or our music, or our atmosphere - or our aesthetic. And I am hardly gay!"

"Sure, we believe you, Dan," laughed Doyle, stretching his long, slender body out across the rest of the sofa as Cindy got up to go back into the kitchen. "That's why you're more interested in our handsome support bands than our groupies on tour."

It was the same dumb shit he knew had wound me up on that whole Dieter Crotch Watch site, but I fell for it anyway, like I always fell for Doyle's wind-ups. "Fuck off, I never indulge in groupies, because I have respect for women, unlike you. Because I have respect for Merry, for my girlfriend, who I love, not to do things I know would hurt her. My girlfriend. Merry. The _girl_ I am attracted to, which makes me heterosexual." I knew I sounded overly defensive, but I couldn't help it. The film in the background was totally weirding me out, the homo-eroticism of bits like the scene with all the gangsters looking at body building magazines, staring me in the face, though I had never noticed it before.

Cindy laughed as she walked back into the living room, bearing the first of the pizzas. "Merry always said to me, she has a male and female angle, it was one of the first things we talked about, when we became friends."

"She... She..." I huffed and puffed, then took another sip of wine, trying to cool my head as the rest of the band argued over slices of meat or seafood pizza. I didn't even know why it bothered me so much. This was just Cindy's nonsense, saying that Merry turned into a bloke when she was around her male bandmates too much. I tried not to think about the many ways in which Merry was, actually, totally blokey, how she'd taken the more masculine role through so much of our early relationship, how she had chased me, how she was the one to ask for my phone number, asked me out, then later, how she was the one who had resisted having 'a _relationship_ ', while I pushed her, like a clingy girl, to commit. Even how she was even the one that had eventually asked me to marry her, that weekend in Connecticut - and how easy I'd found not just being courted, but letting her go out and be in the successful band, while I stayed home and took the caretaker role in A&R. There _were_ so many ways in our relationship, in which she had been the 'dude', and I had been the 'girl'.

Propping himself up on one elbow to eat his pizza, Doyle fixed me with a steely gaze, as behind him, half-naked gangsters wrestled on the screen. "Would you still date Merry, if she were a boy? You're so into her, I bet you would."

I nearly choked on an olive. "What an absurd question! Don't be fucking stupid, Doyle. She is a girl. Male and female angles or what, she is still a girl, and she is the person that I love and desire. I... I don't desire other people because I am happy with Merry, however or... in whatever way. I love _Merry_. I don't understand why that's so hard for you." I suddenly felt very, very stoned. The film was totally messing my head up, or maybe it was my bandmates messing my head up.

"You notice he didn't deny it," hooted Doyle. "Because Merry totally is the boy in their relationship, and he is totally gay."

"Leave Daniel alone," Dieter suddenly interrupted. "So he's attracted to Merry because she's Merry. Some people do just have a person-centered sexuality. It doesn't matter if Daniel is heterosexual or homosexual, he's just Merry-osexual."

"Thank you," I snapped, though this being Dieter, I couldn't help but wonder if there was something backhanded in the statement. He never took my side in bickering with Doyle, unless there was something in it for him.

"Gay," burped Doyle, as if he hadn't been the one caught with his pants down, getting head from Dieter. "Totally gay. You can tell by the waistcoats."

"You're being really offensive, and I'd appreciate if you stopped implying sexual orientation as an insult," chided Cindy.

"I'm only fucking with him," Doyle countered grumpily, slumping back into the sofa. "It's so easy to wind him up. He's so neurotic about his sexuality and his masculinity, the little metrosexual with his hair gel and his facial moisturiser."

"What's wrong with my hair gel?" I sputtered, reaching self-consciously for my hair to check my curls hadn't come loose. "And anyway, Dieter uses a ton more hair gel than I do." And suddenly, I felt very self conscious about pointing that out, because we all knew how Dieter felt about, um, homosexual acts, at least when he was whacked out on coke.

"Who appointed you the gender police, anyway, Doyle? You're being so simplistic and reductive," said Cindy, sounding suddenly more reasonable than anyone else in the room. "Gender and sex and sexuality are not the same thing at all, stop putting them in a blender just to wind up your bandmate."

"Aren't they the same difference?" shrugged Dick, who was getting down most of the pizza while we bantered. "I am lost here, guys. What are we even arguing about? How can Dan be gay? He has a girlfriend."

"We're arguing, that, if gender and sex are not the same thing, then despite having a fanny, Merry is basically a bloke," Doyle teased. "Which makes Dan gay."

"Gender and sex are _what_?" Dick was totally confused. "If they're not the same thing, what are they?"

"Sex is what's between your legs. Gender is what's between your ears," Cindy explained patiently. "Read Kate Bornstein; read Judith Butler, it's all in there." Across the room, Dieter's eyes suddenly snapped wide open as he stared at Cindy. "Sexuality is who you're attracted to, but you can be attracted to a person's mind, as much as you can be attracted to a person's body. It can work either way. Daniel, for what it's worth, I always thought that was why you and Merry worked so well together; she's such a boyish girl, and you're such a girly boy. Both of you have a male and female angle, so you fit together. It's a good thing, it works for you."

If I had not been so stoned, I would have been furious at that remark, but as it was, I just lay back on the sofa and contemplated it with the gentle puzzlement of a smoke-befuddled mind. If Merry were a boy, and I were a girl, would I still love Merry? I tried to imagine it, and thought I probably would. After all, Merry in a suit at the Dior shoot had been hot-damn handsome. And I knew exactly what I'd look like as a girl; I'd look a lot like Pris, like my mother, small and delicate and slightly Welsh, with pale skin and green eyes and dark hair cascading in ringlets. No, wait, what the actual fuck. Why was I even thinking like this? That was ridiculous. Cindy was doing all of our heads in.

"I think I have a male and female angle," Doyle sighed, his T-shirt riding up on his taut stomach as he leaned back across the sofa. With his long, blond hair falling in his beautiful face, for a second I almost believed him.

"Bullshit, pretty boy!" snorted Dieter, the contempt ringing through his laughter. "What you are, Doyle, is a narcissist. It doesn't matter to you if it's a man or woman who desires you, so long as you're desired."

Doyle raised himself on his elbows again, studying Dieter carefully for some time before replying. "Takes one to know one."

"At least I don't pine away, dabbling in other people's identity for kicks, because I want to fuck unobtainable lesbians," Dieter flipped back.

"At least I don't suck cock," Doyle shot back.

"Boys," warned Cindy, though her voice stayed flirty and feminine. "Ain't nothing wrong with sucking a bit of cock. Sucking cock can be a god-given delight."

All four of us blushed, and I tried not to stare, even though that was probably her intention, and she basked in the attention, as Dieter gazed outright, with sharp and unmistakable interest, and Doyle watched her from under his long bangs. But it was Doyle who spoke first. "What's it like?"

Cindy stiffened, but her smile deepened on her face, as if holding back intense emotion. "What, sucking cock? I'm sure one of the boys round here can oblige you with one, if you're inclined to give it a try." Her eyes flickered, ever so subtly, towards Dieter, as if she had already sussed out which way the sexual currents in my band flowed.

"No," drawled Doyle. "I meant, what's it like, changing gender from a man to a woman?" I could never quite tell, with Doyle, if the question was innocent, or if there was some kind of malice lurking underneath it.

"I wouldn't know," said Cindy, rather quietly, and with extra charm and politeness underneath that Southern accent. I realised at that moment, that Cindy had never told any of us, who she was, and that the question was completely out of order. "I've never _changed_ gender. I have always known who - and what - I was. A woman. I just changed my clothes and my body to match."

"So you're not, like, a drag queen," Doyle persisted, and I felt my face growing hot. Cindy was a _friend,_ both of Merry's, and of mine. A good friend. Cindy had looked after my girlfriend during some of the darkest periods of our lives, and for that, I felt like I owed her my loyalty, at the very least.

"Doyle," I warned. "You're over the line. Show some respect to our hostess. Back off."

"Come on, Dan, aren't you even curious?" Doyle took another swig of beer, but there was no way he could use drunkenness as an excuse for his outright rudeness. "Go on, I am genuinely intrigued, Cindy. Your breasts look like implants, though good ones. But have you had, like, you know, the snip, right?"

"Doyle!" I snapped, suddenly very angry, maybe even a little bit guilty that it was a question I had once, another lifetime ago, been tempted to ask. "Fuck _off_!"

"Why, Doyle, honey, I do not believe my genital arrangements are any of your business, unless you are sitting in my lap. Unless, of course, you are interested in me that way, in which case, honey, just ask me on a date." Cindy's voice stayed low, teasing, like she was totally in charge of her emotions, but her eyes flashed.

"I didn't mean it like that," Doyle protested, all innocence, as his blue eyes opened wide. "I just meant... I dunno. I'm curious about what it's like to... put on a dress, and become a girl. I've always wondered."

Cindy burst out laughing. "Honey, it takes more than just putting on a dress to be a girl. Clothing... dresses, jeans, suits, that's _all_ just drag. It's the meaning that we _bring_ to that dress that signifies something, not the dress itself. I'm a woman in skirts, and a woman in trousers. You think I'm in drag because I'm wearing a dress? Honey, all of _you_ are are the ones in drag!"

Dieter had sat up and was staring at her with intense interest. "That's a really intriguing thing to say. I'm not disagreeing, but... How are we in drag? Tell me more."

"You've got Daniel, a little boy who's afraid to grow up, wandering around playing dress-up in suits because he thinks a grown-up's clothes will make him a man. You've got Dick, in cowboy boots and a Western shirt to make sure everyone knows he's a nice, polite Texan boy, free from the corruptin' influence of New York City. And then you, Dieter, the self-hating Jewish boy wandering around in Nazi drag, like, what the hell is that even about? You're like a character out of Christopher Isherwood, Dee." As soon as she said that, I saw something change, something soften in his face. Dieter had long loved Isherwood's Berlin stories, in fact I half suspected that his 'German Stormtrooper' stage costume had had its genesis in one of our NYU all-night film marathons. He and his mates had watched Cabaret so many times it had turned into an impromptu costume party halfway through. But Cindy didn't return his gaze, not immediately. Her eyes took in each one of us in turn. "All of you guys, you wear way more drag than I have ever worn, even when I was singing at the Pyramid Club!"

Doyle's eyes flickered round, first to me, then to Dick, then to Dieter, before coming back to Cindy. There was a fear in his face, that I had never seen before. "That might be those guys, but what about me?"

Cindy shrugged lightly, and looked directly back at him. "I don't know, Doyle. You're the smart-ass here. What's that smart-ass tongue you direct at everyone else covering up? What _about_ you?"

For once, Doyle had no come-back. My band fell silent as the buzzer went in the kitchen, the timer announcing the next round of pizzas, and Cindy disappeared to the kitchen. We all avoided each others' eyes and concentrated on the television screen, as Anita Pallenberg slunk across the screen, wearing nothing but a marmalade coloured fur. But even from across the room, I could see the smile had returned to Dieter's face. But this time, it wasn't  that sick, ugly smile of triumph. It was the curious and playful smile he used to wear, way back in our NYU days.


	38. I've Got Two Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel is in a panic, as Metropolis' bassist seems to be playing with fire, drawn into a flirtation with their producer's wife, Cindy.
> 
> In the midst of the immense pressure of recording a major label debut, Daniel lets things slide, and makes a decision which will destroy one of the most important things in his life.
> 
> The tension which has been building between Doyle and Dieter since Miami - or before - explodes into a fight, during which Dieter reveals some of his most intimate secrets.
> 
> Content warning: racism, both overt and microaggressions

On Monday, I was late for the morning session - not my fault, as Barry had suggested that I restring my 330 to see if that dealt with the tuning issue - and it took way longer than I expected, as one of the screws in the bridge was actually loose and kept slipping. I found a screwdriver, and tightened it, and indeed, my B string stopped going flat all the time.

But when I got into the downstairs lounge of the studio, I saw Dieter and Cindy lolling on one of the sofas together, talking softly over a game of chess.

"Honey, we all went through it, back in the 80s, when they still called it _The Gay Plague_. We all had our scares, we all lost people we loved. I don't know how, but I got lucky. I had a lover - years before Barry - who died of it. But I'm clean. Yea, though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I came out alive. And it's important to remember that, to take that gift, of being alive, and treasure it."

"But _why_ am I alive? Why am I clear, when Linda and Frank... they're living with a death sentence? I fucked both of them. Why did they get it, and not me?"

"Survivor guilt, honey. Don't go there. Don't give into it. Be alive. Live. Love."

"Love... what does that word even _mean_?"

"You've never been in love?"

Dieter shook his head slowly, with an odd yearning expression on his face as he drifted closer to her, leaning in for the kill. "Not for real. Not with anyone who ever _loved me back_. I don't even think I'd know how."

Cindy smiled slowly, and I felt every hair on my body stand on end with the danger of such an attractive woman so close to my philandering bassist. "Maybe it's time you learned?"

I coughed loudly to show they were not alone, internally cringing with fear at the idea that Dieter could be so stupid as to make a move on our producer's wife. "Shouldn't you be upstairs?" I asked pointedly.

"Nah, it's fine. Barry reckons that it's Dick and Doyle who are most locked in together, with just guitar and guide vocals for the drum tracking. I'm superfluous at this point." But Dieter didn't say this with his usual annoyance, he said it with a decided wink towards Cindy.

"OK..." I observed, feeling slightly piqued. It was usually me that did the guide guitar with Dick, leading the drums with my staccato rhythm. "Well, I'll just go up and check on them, see how they're..." As I moved towards the stairs, Cindy unfolded herself from the sofa and stood up.

"Aw, no, honey, don't you do that. If you muck up their take, Barry will kill you. Let me go up, I know how to get into the studio without making a noise."

"Hurry back, or I'll take your bishop, my dear," Dieter called after her as she walked away.

"Sweetheart, they done took that a long time ago," Cindy teased back, primping her hair as she glanced back at him, winking before she skipped up the stairs, as silently as a cat.

Dieter stared after her for some time, with an unusual expression on his face. An expression that on anyone else's face, might have been read as a smile, except I knew Dieter's smile very well, and it was never not filled with maliciousness or self interest. This was the smile of a little boy. It oddly suited him.

"I didn't know you played chess," I observed, studying the chess board.

"Grand master at my high school," Dieter shrugged, touching Cindy's queen for a naughty moment as if considering cheating.

"Uh-uh!" I warned.

"Don't be silly. I wouldn't do that to Cindy." He seemed oddly sincere about this.

"And how is Cindy's chess playing?" I asked, knowing full well that that wasn't the question I really wanted to ask.

"Cindy's chess playing, like everything else about Cindy, is exquisite," Dieter informed me with that funny almost-a-smile expression on his usually cruel lips.

I felt a vague sense of panic, leaning in and lowering my voice as I reminded him "Dieter, remember, she used to be a _man_."

Dieter looked up at me, perplexed, then his face turned to something akin to pity. "So?" I just stared at him, wide-eyed. "Oh, don't be so boringly heteronormative, Daniel. Gender is just a construct, a role we perform as if acting in a play. Read some Judith Butler, find out what life's all about."

"Well, if that doesn't bother you, maybe the fact that she is our producer's wife might? Can you just think about something other than your cock for a change?"

"And you could try not imposing your arbitrary standards of morality on other people, for a change?" Dieter shot back, but as he glanced up, I realised that he was not angry, he was just playing, with a spark of amusement in his eye that had been missing for a very long time. It was the mischievous Dieter of old, arguing impossible philosophical positions, just for the sheer hell of it. The Dieter I had missed like hell.

 

The next morning, when I came down to breakfast, Dieter was already ensconced in the morning room, staring out through the picture windows using a pair of binoculars. "There he is!" howled Dieter, with palpable delight, trailing someone or something across the woods.

"Let me see, let me see?" Cindy demanded, appearing and taking the glasses from him as Dieter pointed to a clump of trees in the distance. "Oh, he's gone. What did he look like."

"I told you, he was bright red. Crimson, blood-red, with black wings. I see him every morning, he's quite dashing for a little fellow." Whatever it was, Dieter sounded awfully excited about it. "That colour scheme, it's so eye-catching."

"Sounds like a Scarlet Tanager," Cindy mused, flicking the glasses back and forth. "Oh yes! I see him, perched on the branch of that crooked tree. Definitely a Tanager, though I would have thought it would be too early for that plumage. Well done, you must have incredibly good eyes, Dee."

"What on earth are you two looking at?" I wondered, sniffing at the breakfast sausages to determine which of them were vegetarian.

"Birds," shrugged Dieter, with that same condescending tone he used for dropping obscure German industrial groups that he considered you completely illiterate for never having heard of.

"Birds," I repeated. And apparently, he actually did mean the feathered kind, not the female British variety, as he and Cindy passed the binoculars back and forth between them.

"Nature is so incredible," Dieter gushed, with the same enthusiasm he'd once reserved for French philosophers and dreadful conceptual artists from Williamsburg. "I never realised! Birds are just so astonishing when you think about it. Like tiny flying dinosaurs, and we take them utterly for granted. And the mountains... the mountains are amazing. And the sky! The sky looks so incredible, up in the country. The colour of it! Did you ever see such a colour of the sky? Yves Klein blue would shrink with embarrassment before that very shade." The expression on Dieter's face, as he turned towards Cindy was one of pure, childlike joy.

I looked out at the sky. Although the mist was clearing, boiling off into a beautiful day, it just seemed, well, sky-coloured to me. I turned back to Dieter, puzzled. "So what are we working on today?"

"Menage. Doyle says he really wants to really nail Menage today." Dieter grinned in anticipation.

"And where is Doyle, then?"

Dieter turned back to the window, and pointed out, halfway up a mountain trail, a tiny figure running steadily towards us.

My whole band are fucking crazy, I decided, especially when Dick stomped into the house, carrying an armful of freshly split logs he'd been working on. But if this gang of relaxed mountain men could get in the studio and nail the angry, tense, frenetic energy of our new song, then this crazy studio would be worth it. We had _got_ to make an impression on MVC, and this song might just do the trick.

The four of us regrouped in the main room of the studio, facing one another in a loose diamond, with Dick's drumkit in the middle, in front of the picture windows. Dieter's bass was going direct, but us two guitarists had our amps in isolation booths at the back, and everyone trailed headphones, Doyle's scratch vocals protected from the drum mics by a plexiglass screen. We'd tried building the song in layers with overdubs, but it just hadn't worked, sucking all the tense, nervous energy out of the track. So Barry and Old Ken had set us all up in the round, and miked us carefully, risking the mistakes of four musicians all trying to nail an unfamiliar song at once in order to try to recreate our live energy.

On the first take, I could feel the energy level in the room rise, the four of us bearing down on our instruments with an intensity that almost frightened me. Some kind of synergy happened when we all played together like that, spurring one another on to greater heights. Across the room, I could see Doyle staring at me, glaring at me as he sang, as if he wanted to reach out through the microphone and strangle me, so I kicked back with my guitar, slashing at Doyle with the violence of my attack on my strings. We nearly had it that time, but Dick muffed the end, finishing just slightly too late, not grabbing the crash cymbal in time to still it, expecting to hit it one more time, a flabby swishing sound instead of the necessary terse smash.

"Shit," swore Dick, but we were all too excited to be angry at him.

"No, that was absolutely perfect, except for the ending" called Barry from the mixing desk. "Do it again exactly like that. But first, just tune your B string, for me, Daniel."

"Give me the tempo, give me the tempo," Dick urged, holding his headphones to his ear as Barry ran the click track for a bit. I checked my B string. Oh, alright, now it was slightly sharp. This fucking guitar! I re-tuned quickly as Dick concentrated on the click. "OK, got it. Ready, guys?" We all nodded and got our heads down, then Dick hit his sticks together three times (missing out the implied last beat so it wouldn't be caught on tape) and we all slammed into action.

And I couldn't believe it, but that take was even better, more angry, more jagged, more incendiary. Doyle was glaring at me openly now, his teeth bared, staring me down as if he wanted to kill me, and I fought back with everything I had, punching the guitar strings as if stabbing Doyle repeatedly. We soared through the middle eight, then fell back to earth in a dogfight through the last chorus, and then the end, three sharp shocks, all together, guitars, bass and cymbals, blam! blam! smash! Yes! Dick caught the cymbal and held it, as we waited with baited breath for Barry to hit pause.

"That was perfect," said Barry. "Now do it again."

The third time was good, but I already knew it was the second take that was The One. When we moved on to the next track, the insane level of energy in the room stayed exactly where it was, and we tore up the next take like a rampaging army. And the next. I had an instinct for when my band were working, and when we were just going through the motions, but this felt like something different again. All the faffing and fucking about of the previous month's scrapped sessions suddenly fell away. It was like a new creature was being born.

Instead of breaking for lunch, we ate sandwiches perched around the mixing desk, listening back to the rough mixes on the good monitor speakers. All of us agreed - this was something new, something we should go with. So we carried on, all through the afternoon, until the sun set, and then Barry looked at us as if considering something, then shook his head.

"You guys are absolutely on fire right now. So I'm going to ask you to do something I've never done before. I want you to keep rolling for another hour or two. Are you guys OK with that?"

"That's how we work best," Doyle shrugged.

"Ken, are you OK with pulling a bit of overtime?"

Old Ken shrugged. "You write my paycheques, boss. You tell me." And so we all shouldered our instruments and plugged on, recording another two songs after the sun had set.

I was so tired I collapsed into bed that night without even stopping for supper, then was back up at the crack of dawn again, rushing over to the studio to warm up my amps and tune my guitar. Would the magic hold a second day? It was like we were flying, and having a four-way fist fight, all at the same time, the music collapsing like a demolished building all around us, but in an intense, incredible way. And in four days, we recorded the backing tracks for 14 songs. When Metropolis had come up against the constraints of Barry's recording methods, Metropolis had triumphed. It was like we needed the intensity of those marathon sessions, and fed off our emotions for one another, distilled by the long hours into pure loathing that seethed off the master tapes.

In the midst of it, Cindy had told me "By the way, Merry called the other day."

But, exhausted and distracted, I had just stared at her, and wondered "What other day?" Merry was very, very far away from my thoughts at that moment, and I didn't want to be dragged back to the mundane world of relationships and girlfriends, away from the pure world of noise and slashing guitar tone.

"Yesterday or the day before? You went straight to bed without dinner, so I didn't tell you, but she rang again. It sounded important."

I looked at the phone, feeling like this was the last conversation I wanted to be having at that moment, but then I caught sight of the clock on the wall. It was 10pm at night, so god only knew what time it was in England. "I'll call her tomorrow," I told Cindy, and collapsed into bed.

On the fifth day, the truce gave out. Barry had Dick scheduled in for two days of drum overdubs, but Dick was tired and struggling as he surrendered to a dose of the flu. So Dick said fuck the drum overdubs, he was going to bed, someone else could take the studio time. And Doyle and Dieter looked at me, and fuck it, that was it. It was two days of my guitar overdubs instead, while the two of them goofed around in the woods. Doyle went trail-running, and Dieter disappeared off in his quest for elusive birds and other assorted wildlife.

"You better call Merry," Cindy told me at breakfast the next day, even as she and Dieter were giggling over a bird handbook and a map. She and Dieter had informed the assembled company that they were going off on a nature walk, in search of something called the Tufted Titmouse, and I didn't even want to know what that was a euphemism for.

"Shit," I swore, realising that it was 3 or 4 days now that she had been trying to get hold of me. So I picked up the post-it notes that had accumulated on top of the phone, and dialled the international calling code, followed by the number. Gabe answered on about the third or fourth ring, and after enquiring quickly after his well-being, I asked for Merry.

"Sorry, mate. She isn't here. She's at the doctor's all afternoon today."

" _Doctors_?" I asked, feeling a sudden wrench in my chest. Why the hell hadn't I called her before? "What's wrong? Is she ill?" I demanded, remembering the last time she'd dropped off the radar, with a bizarre Australian viral infection.

"I don't think she's _ill_ ," Gabe hedged, somewhat mysteriously. "Like, not _proper_ ill. Might be a stomach bug or something, she's been sicking up worse than my cat. But she'll be back tonight, she said."

"What's she at the doctor for, then, if she's not ill?" I demanded testily. "What is it, a norovirus? A food allergy? An irritable gluten intolerant syndrome or whatever?"

"Look, I dunno, mate. She didn't tell _me_. Girl stuff, I guess. She and my girlfriend gone to some clinic in Brixton for the day. No idea. I'll tell her you rang, though. She should be back about 6 if you want to try again."

But when I rang back that afternoon, Gabe told me that Merry had come straight in and just gone to bed. Rolling my eyes with annoyance, I went right back into the studio and took my frustrations out on my guitar overdubs, warping the tremolo arm of my new Gretsch until the music bubbled and seethed and if Barry thought that the tuning was wrong on that guitar, he could suck it.

Finally, the next morning, the phone rang while I was eating breakfast. Since Cindy and Dieter were cooing over a trail map, I strode over and answered it myself, relieved when I heard Merry's voice crackling over the long distance connection. "So you finally remembered to call me," she said coolly.

"I'm sorry, I've been recording. How are you? What is going on? Are you ill, why have you been in the doctor's?" I felt my heart rate rising as I panicked over all the things that might have been.

"I'm fine now," Merry assured me, though her voice still sounded cold, but maybe she was just very tired. "It's all OK."

"Well, tell me what you were in for. Just tests or something, then?" I didn't like feeling so out of the loop like this.

"Yes, just a test of some kind," Merry agreed. "It's all taken care of now. Don't worry. I know you're very busy in the studio at the moment. I know this is a huuuuge deal for you, I know the pressure that being on a major label applies to you. You've got so much on your plate right now, I know you don't have the time for... my shit. It's _fine_."

"Are you happy, though?" I asked, remembering the odd tone of her last email, though she had not responded to my reply. "Are things going better in London than they were in New York?"

"Yes. Yes, I think I am," she told me, though she still sounded... well, kind of groggy. Or maybe it was just the bad connection. I worried about her, feeling so impotent to help her, so far away. "It's been good, spending time with Gabe, remembering who I am, and what I'm really about."

"Are you starting another band?" I probed. "I hope you're starting a new one. Your own band, the best damn rhythm section in the world."

She laughed, and the cold tone faded from her voice. "Yeah, we are. It's really different, the songs we've been writing together, but yeah. It's sounding really good, and we're so excited about it. We're trying to get hold of some other musicians to play it live, but... we want to find the _right_ people this time. That's really important." She paused, and I could picture her stretching and shifting the phone from one ear to the other. "How is your recording going, or do I dare not ask? You lot still at each others' throats?"

"No, it's actually good now," I told her, and was pleased to find it was the truth. "We've broken through the block to a place where it's actually working now. It was a real slog the first couple of weeks, Barry was riding our asses hard..."

"Yeah, Barry is totally like that. But trust me, it's good for you."

"Yup, he did teach me that the things that are really worth something to you, they are truly worth struggling and fighting for and putting the work in."

"So he gave you that little lecture, too, huh?" she giggled.

"He was right, though."

"Oh, Danny, I daw you," she sighed, all in a rush. "And I'm sorry I'm not there, and I'm sorry I can't be who you want me to be, and I'm sorry for... _everything_. But..."

"But nothing. I daw you, and that's all that matters," I said swiftly, as if that put an end to it. Just hearing her voice on the other end of the line, it reminded me why I put up with all this shit. It was being a musician that had first impressed Merry, and it was being a rock star that would keep her. "I should go. I'll miss the morning planning session. But I'll call you next week, OK?"

"Email me before then. I miss your name in my inbox."

"I will. Promise." I signed off the phone, blowing kisses down the line, and made my way through into the breakfast room, to find that Dieter and Cindy had gone, but Dick was sitting there, calmly eating his breakfast.

"How are you feeling?"

"Like a new man, boss," Dick assured me. "Cindy's special flu-relief vitamin blast worked wonders on me."

"Good. Then it's your turn doing overdubs today."

I gave myself the day off. I took a bath up in the deep, claw-footed old tub in the bathroom opposite Dieter's bedroom - though, first I had to remove a stack of books which someone had left carelessly propped open on the windowsill, as if they'd been reading them in the tub. I picked one up, and noted the sticker on the inside cover: 'Ex Libris: Cindy Birdweather.' It was by some philosopher called Audre Lorde but I couldn't make head nor tail of it. The other one was a gothic looking tome called _The Wretched Of The Earth_ by some Algerian cat named Frantz Fanon. Christ, that had to be Dieter's, so I removed them both and dumped them on his bed. For nearly half an hour, I soaked myself in boiling hot water, then dressed warmly and decided to head out for a little stroll.

But instead of following the path down into the town and the Rainbow Mushroom cafe, which I had been avoiding since Dieter's little scene, I turned up the other way, following a stream into the hills. For a short while, it was quite easy-going, then abruptly turned steep, with patches of mud between huge boulders like stepping stones. Cursing my footwear, even though I had worn my most winter-friendly ankle boots, I looked about for an easier path, then spotted a stone-cut stairway hiving off from the main trail. That, at least, was not muddy, so I diverted my path and hopped up the steeper but somewhat cleaner option. After climbing for about ten minutes, it finally evened out on a long narrow ledge. This was edged with a thin metal fence which, although it would probably have done nothing to break my fall, at least provided some psychological comfort as I worked my way along, following the path of the river, but about 50 feet in the air.

When I reached a low stone bench, I stopped. It had been a nice walk, but that was quite enough of this nature thing for one morning. The Wild might have seduced my bandmates, but I was very much a city dweller, and I was convinced that too much in the way of fresh air might be a shock to my delicate system. I hadn't even brought a ventolin puffer out with me, so I better take it easy. So instead I sat for a few minutes, catching my breath and admiring the view, which I did have to admit was quite nice, back down the stream's ravine towards the village, with the ever-present mountains looming in the background.

Then suddenly I heard voices, jarring me out of my contemplation. I looked about, but saw no one else on the trail. For a moment, my heart beat faster, thinking of all the strange legends of hauntings in Upstate New York - Sleepy Hollow and all that - but then I looked down, and saw two hikers were following a lower, muddier trail on the other side of the river. As they grew closer, they resolved into the forms of Cindy and Dieter. I almost didn't recognise Dieter, who was dressed as some kind of Victorian explorer, in tweed trousers and a slurry coloured hacking jacket. Wearing a colour other than black, he didn't look quite so vampiric as he typically did, and his hair had been left to dry naturally, curling down over his ears and joining up with what was on the verge of turning from a few days' worth of stubble into a full beard. I'd never seen the normally fastidious Dieter unshaven before! But, most surprising of all was that Dieter was smiling, not his usual closed-lipped cynical smile of maliciousness, but a full, open smile of childlike joy, his metal teeth glinting in the morning sun.

"What a joyous day," Dieter was holding forth. "Why let our feathered friends have the best part of the morning to themselves? I feel so alive, up here in the mountains, touching the bones of the earth. It stirs my soul, Cindy."

Cindy said something in reply, but her low voice did not carry, then she left the trail to perch on a large boulder by the edge of the stream.

"Yes, of course I believe in the soul, my dear. Though, granted, for many years I did not. All the things I tried to blot out my soul with, you would not believe. Cocaine, drugs, cheap sex, hedonism, anything, not to have to _feel_. Empty pleasures, all of them. Perfectly soul-destroying. But up here, surrounded by all this... by the truly sublime... I feel my soul stir in ways I can no longer ignore. It's the soul that loves - doesn't that go along with what you were saying earlier? Sex involves just the body, but to love requires the brain and the mind and... well, the soul. That's the only word for it."

Another rejoinder from Cindy, and it was so frustrating hearing only one side of the conversation, because I already knew the kind of crap that Dieter spouted, while Cindy was still such a mystery to me.

From the way Dieter's face lit up, it was obvious she had said something profound, I recognised that animated spark in his eye like he was duelling, sparring with her intellectually. "You're absolutely right. At college, we learned to call that Cartesian Mind-Body Dualism, and it's a dangerous trap. It's easy to think of yourself as a brain to be intrigued and a body to be gratified, and one trying - or failing - to rule the other. But there's so much more..."

"No." As the breeze died down and the clattering of branches stilled, I heard Cindy more clearly across the steep valley. "It's so much less. You've already overcomplicated it, you're overthinking again. It's not one or the other, it's both. Thinking and feeling work together. They're not enemies, they're different tools, you are the same man from different angles, whether thinking or feeling. You've somehow learned to trust only one, only thinking, but never the other. It's OK to inhabit both sides, Dee. You are one human being, not two."

"But Cindy, I _am_ two human beings." Dieter had dropped that hectoring, strident tone he used when holding forth, and it had become harder to hear him as his voice grew quieter, more honest. "You don't even know. Nobody knows. I have so carefully compartmentalised parts of myself - huge parts of myself - and locked them away. Until I seem to have become two human beings. And I've been that way for so long that... Well, I don't know what would happen if I ever let myself inhabit the other half."

"But what would happen if you just let yourself _feel_? Just feel, and be present, in the here and now. What do you feel, Dee, tell me what you _feel_?"

For a few minutes, Dieter stood, hands on his hips, feet planted wide, an intense look of concentration on his face. He was still surveying the valley as if it were his domain, but for some reason, he did not bother to look straight up, at the opposite side of the river, and me in my cliffside perch.

Cindy made a slightly scoffing face. "The ever loquacious Dieter F, finally at a loss for words. Alert the NME..." she teased.

Dieter laughed, the intense concentration on his face finally breaking. "You know why? Because I can't remember the last time someone asked me how I felt. I can't remember the last time someone asked me who I _was_. People see the shallowest of things - my band, my clothes, the absurd games one plays with the press - and they construct entire fantasies around those images and project them onto me. They don't love - or even desire - _me_. They've confused the actor with the role."

"Well, stop playing, Dieter, and just tell me. What are you feeling right now?"

"I feel _alive_ , my little tufted titmouse... You make me feel alive," Dieter confessed. Then he stepped carefully off the trail, his massive Doc Martens splashing easily through the mud as he strode to join her on the boulder, sitting down carefully next to her before wrapping one of his arms around her shoulders. For a moment, he stared at her with an intent expression completely unlike the way Dieter normally looked at his conquests, an expression totally free of guile or manipulation. Then he raised his hand and carefully, tenderly, wiped away an invisible speck of dirt on her cheek, looking deep into her eyes. And then he kissed her with a depth and a passion that left no doubt in my mind that the two of them were already engaged in a deeply carnal affair.

" _Fuck_ ," I said inwardly, though I desperately tried to keep my surprise silent, not wanting to draw attention to my voyeuristic perch. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Was there nothing that Dieter could not wreck with his near suicidal inability to keep it in his pants? Did he not understand how much _pressure_ we were under, from the record company?

But the couple peeled off one another, stopped canoodling and climbed to their feet, Dieter extending his hand like a gentleman to help her over the rocks. Fifty feet up in the air, I climbed to my feet and shadowed them back down the trail towards the house. Trying to think on my feet, I talked myself through various scenarios... confront them? Go straight to Barry? If I had to pick between them, would I sacrifice Dieter to save the sessions? But no. If Barry was in the midst of a furious break-up, would we even be able to salvage the sessions? Or... another plan started to form in my head.

But as I tried to shadow them, I suddenly lost them, as Dieter and Cindy turned off the main path to follow a short drive towards what looked like a log cabin or a bird hide. So this was their trysting place. Dropping back down the long stone staircase, I waited at the turning point, but I could see no bridge across to the other side. Better to go back to the house and try to think.

Dieter and Cindy were back by lunchtime, but now their flushed faces and healthy grins no longer seemed the result of nature hikes, but of something far more insalubrious. Their flirtation over salad vegetables as Cindy prepared lunch no longer seemed innocent, it seemed deadly, and I started to work out the seeds of a plan.

"So, Cindy," I ventured. "I finally got through to Merry. She sends her love..."

"Oh, that's sweet of her," Cindy said. "How is she, enjoying England?"

"Very, very much," I informed her. "She and Gabe are getting a new band together."

"That is so good to hear. That girl is like a river. Damning up her creativity is no good for her at all."

I licked my lips. "You know, they're going to need a manager soon. A manager who actually has their best interests at heart, who knows Merry, and what she needs, really super-well."

Cindy turned her large, handsome, chocolate brown eyes towards me, a smile dancing on the edge of her lips as the form of my plan dawned on her. "And why are you telling me this, Asheton?"

"I can't think of anyone who would be better placed to manage Merry's new band than yourself." Manage Merry's new band, from England. Far away from Catskills Mansions and our lusty bassist, I did not add, as I gave what I hoped was an open, disarming smile.

"I'm a road manager, not a band manager," Cindy pointed out, though I could see it in her eyes, that she was tempted.

"You seem to manage the studio just fine," I pointed out.

"And that's exactly it. What on earth would you boys do, without me here to look after you."

"Well, just think about it," I soothed her, knowing that the best thing was to leave it, and let the idea sit and play upon Cindy's mind. "I know she adores you, and trusts you. And I do, too. Trust you implicitly." At least when it came to matters of Merry's career, and not our profligate bassist.

"Humph," snorted Cindy, tapping her orchid coloured fingernails against the kitchen counter, while eyeing me with a stare that seemed to both distrust me and have my fiendish plan all figured out already.

As the food came out of the oven, Doyle appeared in the kitchen with immaculate timing. "Do I smell lunch?" he asked hopefully, clapping me on the shoulder, then he turned to Dieter. "Hey, man, you're looking really good. Are you growing a beard?" Dieter smiled non-committally, the tight-lipped smile I was more used to, so Doyle persisted. "Nah, man, I like the beard. You should go with it. Don't you think, Dan? Since you're our resident _serious beard_ expert."

"I'm not sure on the beard," I hedged. Though I had been cultivating a three-day scruff for some time now, this was because without stubble, I looked about 12, and still got carded for buying beer, even though I was fast approaching 30.

"Nah, you look good, Dee. Especially with that tan. The beard, the tan, it suits you. Looking very swarthy, very exotic, like Metropolis' resident Latin Lover. Or maybe more a sultry desert sheikh sort of vibe going on? Very Rudy Valentino. Very chic."

The expression on Dieter's face simmered with rage as this speech progressed, then exploded over into outright fury. "Fuck... you... Doyle," he finally spat, turned on the heel of his Doc Martens and strode from the room.

"What did I say?" Doyle shrugged, grabbing a slice of bread from the counter. "What the fuck's got into Dieter now?"

Cindy fixed him with an expression of disdain. "You complete jack-ass."

I shook my head, then quickly looked down at the table, even as Dieter suddenly swung back into the room like an angry tornado. "Fuck you, Doyle, and fuck you, too, Daniel, you fucking Anglo pricks. Fuck you English pussies and your whole white supremacist shit, you think you're so much fucking better than me? Well, fuck your white Anglo-Saxon passports to fucking privilege, and fuck _you_." It had been a long time since I had seen Dieter that angry, and to be honest, it scared me a little.

" _What_?" Doyle looked absolutely perplexed, and more than a little pissed off. "Calm the fuck down, Dee, I was trying to compliment you. I said you looked _good_."

"Latin Lover?" snapped Dieter. "Sultry sheikh? What kind of fucking micro-aggression bullshit is this?"

"Aggression? Dude, you get more pussy than the rest of Metropolis put together, I don't know what the fuck you're complaining about," Doyle shrugged. "I was trying to pay you a compliment. You look good, that's all I said. So I don't know what this... reverse racist bullshit you're throwing at me for being 'white' is about. Like you're not as white as we are?"

"I'm not _white_ ," Dieter spat.

"What the fuck are you talking about, you're going to try to say that _German Jew_ is not white, now?" Doyle was now properly riled up, squaring off against him.

"His birth father's Argentinean?" I suggested, at a complete loss for where this explosion was coming from. "I mean, I did think he was a White Argentinean, due to the whole potential Nazi thing, but..."

"My father was _not_ Argentinean, alright?" Dieter hissed, with a deceptive calm that was somehow even more frightening than his rage. "That was just another wind-up for the press, like the Triumph of the Will thing."

"Well, that's the thing, Dieter. You lie so much, how are we supposed to even know what the truth is," Doyle snarled back, his lip curling with disdain.

Something seemed to snap in Dieter, an expression on his face like none I'd ever seen before. "The truth. You want the truth? The truth is, the year before I was born, my mother fell in love with an undocumented Mexican limo driver who worked for her modelling agency. He would pick her up after work, after parties, at all hours of the day and night, drive her home and sit with the engine idling outside her building, waiting until she got up the stairs, and then she would blink the lights in her apartment to let him know she was home safely. He looked after her; took care of her. And he was as handsome as he was kind, she told me. So one night she invited him up for coffee and they fell to talking. One night became every night, after work. They fell in love. She told me once she wanted to marry him, but my grandparents went into conniptions because he wasn't Jewish. When my Mom became pregnant with me, my grandparents had him ejected from the country. When she wouldn't get a quiet abortion, she was ejected from their lives."

"I had no idea," I stuttered, wondering if this were the unacknowledged truth behind the break between Dieter and his family. So that insane Guardian article hadn't been completely off base?

"You have no idea about so many things about me. You know me as just another wealthy NYU student, but the first 8 years of my life, until my Mom met Harvey Finkel, I grew up as a mixed-race kid with a single mother in a housing project in Queens. We lived on food stamps, we lived on WIC vouchers and government cheese. You don't have a fucking clue what that's like, either of you."

"So you're saying your real father was a Mexican?" shrugged Doyle, as if he were trying to wind up Dieter. "Big deal. I've lived in Mexico. Some Mexicans are pretty hot, swarthy or no."

That seemed to send Dieter over the edge, spiralling into rage. "My real father was _mestizo_. Dark. The only photo I've even seen of him, he looks like me, but he's nearly as dark as Cindy. So when you two start with that fucking _swarthy_ bullshit... you know, I may look white, and I may _pass_ for white if I stay out of the sun and never allow myself to catch a tan. But I am not white. And you two limeys with your pasty fucking skin and your white fucking privilege, don't even fucking talk to me about _swarthy_."

And as I sat there, staring, astonished, at my bandmate, his face purple with rage, his unstraightened, curly black hair streaming off the top of his head, I really _looked_ at Dieter for the first time, and saw it. His wide Mayan jaw, his hooked Mayan nose, and those black, black eyes that never were German. How had I never seen it before? Handsome, beautiful, haughty Dieter was mixed race, just like Cindy. And looking back and forth between Dieter, and Cindy, with her beautiful, ambiguous half African, half Latina face, I suddenly wondered if she was the spur that had finally extracted this disclosure.

"I'm sorry, man. I never knew," I said carefully, remembering how wrong things had gone with Merry over Elisha. "I mean, with a name like Ezra Dieter Finkel, you can forgive me for drawing conclusions. But my mistake, my bad."

"I wasn't born Ezra Dieter, that was Harvey's idea," he finally divulged, very quietly. "I was born Esteban Diego. My dad's name. So you can shut the fuck up with your whole swarthy shit, OK?"

"I am sorry. My bad," I repeated.

We both looked at Doyle, as if expecting an apology, or at least an acknowledgement, but none was forthcoming, as Doyle chewed his bread resentfully, then swallowed. "You shouldn't have lied, man. I mean, what do you expect, if you lie to us?"

Dieter's lip curled up with disgust, his nostrils flaring as he glared at Doyle, but he said nothing in reply, taking a hunk of Cindy's spelt loaf before turning on his heels and stalking from the room.

"Damn, Doyle, you should not have said that," I immediately hissed. Doyle merely shrugged and moved towards the counter for his lunch, but Cindy did not make a move to help him, eyeing him with open revulsion. 

"What?" Doyle asked her defensively.

"He wasn't lying, he was trying to _pass_. You don't know jack shit about passing," Cindy said, very very quietly, in a husky voice loaded with unreadable emotion. "So you need to sit down and shut the fuck up, white boy."

" _White_ boy," repeated Doyle. "You're the fucking racist here, Cindy."

Even I put my head into my hands and lowered my head to the table, wishing I could disappear into the bowels of the earth, as Cindy drew herself up to her full height, sucked her teeth at Doyle, then silently followed Dieter out of the kitchen. "For a smart guy, Doyle, you really are a complete fucking idiot," I said, under my breath, but just loud enough that I knew Doyle had to have heard me.

So all along, Dieter had been living as some kind of third culture kid, too. Was that the bond we all three of us shared, even secretly? Suddenly the infuriating Dieter started to make a lot more sense. Those weird swings between insecurity and arrogance. I mean, I'd known Dieter since he was 19, he had always treated his personality like a performance to be carefully constructed, like a piece of art to be fabricated. I'd always thought of it as play; I'd never thought to see it a a masquerade, a mask over a secret he was afraid of being found out. Oh my god, even the constant flirtation with fascism - he wasn't just playing on other people's insecurities about race. He was hiding his own.


	39. House Of Jealous Lovers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel's attempts at breaking up Cindy and Dieter backfire, as the pair of them leave for England to join up with Merry and her new band.
> 
> Which leaves Daniel and Doyle alone, in a house in Upstate NY, where all of the repressed tensions of the past year come to a head.
> 
> Some mild implied slash; some fairly explicit slash discussed.

The sessions somehow never really recovered after Dieter and Doyle's explosive last fight. Winter turned to Spring, and that brought the scourge of pollen. Dick suffered miserably from allergies. So after he finished his days of overdubs, he decided he'd had enough of Upstate New York and its foul cold and murderous trees and hightailed it back to Dallas to be with his wife. Then there were a few days of overexcited Transatlantic phone calls full of girly shrieks, and then Cindy announced that she had offered to manage Merry and Gabe's new band, and been delightedly accepted, so she would be flying to England at the end of the week, to help arrange their auditions. Inside, I breathed a secret sigh of relief that Cindy would be out of temptation's reach. That was, until Dieter announced that he was going with her.

"You can't!" I exploded. "You have to stay and finish our album!"

Dieter merely shrugged. "You recorded all of my parts with the drums. What do you need me for? If you want anything different, I'm sure you and Doyle will just re-record it all over without me, regardless of whether I'm here or not. So I might as well go where I'm wanted. Since Cindy actually _wants_ me around, I'm going with her."

When my plan failed at breaking up the adulterous couple, I finally broke down, approached Barry and asked for a moment alone. "Look, you've got to know Dieter's reputation. I don't mean to pry, but are you really comfortable with your wife disappearing off to Europe for several weeks, in the company of that man?"

Barry laughed and laughed and laughed, physically shaking with laughter, tears streaming down his cheeks. When he finally composed himself, wiping his cheeks with the back of his hand, he patted a paternal hand on my shoulder. "You know, Daniel, for a man who's been in a rock band as long as you have, you are almost shockingly naive."

"Look, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm old fashioned, but I take marriage pretty seriously, and I resent what Dieter is doing to yours," I insisted petulantly.

"Well, it's a good thing Cindy and I aren't married," Barry winked.

"But you call her your _wife_." I stared at him, wondering why he was taking all of this so calmly. There was no way that I would be sitting, laughing like a drain if Merry announced that she was going to be going to England for six weeks with Dieter, even though we were not, technically, married either. Oh, fuck. I had only just realised. If Dieter was going to be with Cindy, and Cindy was now managing Merry's new band, oh, shit, Merry was now going to be spending the next six weeks... holed up in close quarters with Dieter. What the fuck had I done?

Barry finally managed to contain his belly laugh, growing serious again. "The State of New York does not recognise Cindy's gender. We couldn't get married even if we wanted to. And neither of us particularly wants to. Marriage is a bourgeois heterosexual institution aimed at preserving the paternity of children. Why would we want to replicate that, rather than build something new that suits both of us?"

I tried not to let my surprise show all over my face, even as I felt reality slipping away, out from under me. "But you must know... Dieter might be sleeping with Cindy."

Barry beamed with pride. "And having a damn good time of it, too, by the sounds of it."

"You _know_?"

Barry merely shrugged, as if this were the most obvious idea in the world. "You may have heard of a thing called Polyamory? In the olden days, they called it Free Love. Cindy and I are both devotees of the philosophy. Rather than allow infidelity to tear our relationship apart, we accept it, and encourage each others' free sexual expression. I trust her; she trusts me. We do what makes both of us happy."

"But..." I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times, trying desperately to grope my way around the concept mentally. "You're not _jealous_?"

Shaking his head briskly, Barry smiled. "Why should I be?"

"I don't know. It's just..." I moved closer to him, dropping my voice to a whisper. "It doesn't bother you, your girlfriend being with someone else?" There was still a blank look of comprehension on his face. Oh, come on, Barry, don't make me spell it out. "Like, if Merry slept with another guy, I'd never be able to stop mentally comparing myself to him. Wondering if he was better than me, wondering if he had a bigger cock than me, wondering if he was able to give her something that I couldn't." Even the thought of Merry sleeping with another guy, it made me feel sick and dizzy and slightly ill inside. I mean, I knew that Merry had been with other guys while we'd been split up - Peter fucking Book and some nameless groupie she'd accidentally called by my name - but the thought of her being with some guy _now_? It filled me with terror. Doyle had it completely wrong; it was that terror that made me never even want to take advantage of the constant offers on the road. The idea of making Merry feel like this, even for a moment, I could never live with myself.

But Barry seemed unconcerned. "Sex with every person is different, we're all unique, we all bring something different to the table. That's the whole point. Dieter does his thing, I do mine. Cindy and I have been together a long time. A hell of a long time. We've been through a hell of a lot together - heck, when we first met, she was still living as a gay man. So we have an emotional connection and an emotional commitment that goes beyond sex. Way beyond sex. A salutary fling with a broken puppy like Dieter is not a threat to that."

"But..." I grasped around wildly for words, before finally blustering "you don't find it threatening to your masculinity, your partner sleeping around like that?"

At first, Barry just burst out laughing again, as if I'd just told the most hilarious joke, and for a second I wondered, hot damn, like, did gay men even have a masculinity to fret about in quite the same way? But then, seeing the serious and slightly horrified expression on my face, Barry got control over his laughter, and wiped his eyes. "Dan, you've got a lot of issues around your masculinity, don't you? That's something that Cindy did warn me about."

"I..." My face flushed bright red, both with embarrassment but also anger. "Issues? I do not have fucking... _issues_. My masculinity is not up for debate, not by Cindy, not by you, not by anyone."

"Dan," said Barry, sharply but firmly. He tried to place his hand squarely on my shoulder in what he probably imagined was a paternal gesture, but I shrugged him off. "Dan, is your masculinity such a sensitive little thing that it can't survive a jibe from Dieter or an offhand comment from Cindy? Is masculinity really that brittle and fragile? Because you always struck me as someone who had a pretty ineffable sense of self. Do not confuse your sense of masculinity with your machismo. A person's masculinity is generally a lot harder-wearing than you seem to give it credit for."

I stared at Barry, trying to process what he had just said. Because my mind rebelled at the idea, it just sounded too simple, too glib, like it went against everything I'd always been taught, that masculinity was precious and easily punctured - except hang on, what? That just didn't make sense. Masculinity was supposed to be tough and inviolable. How could both ideas be true at once? I wanted to trust Barry, hell, the guy was a legend, he was someone I had respected and looked up to for years now. But he and Cindy just seemed to be rearranging my head on a daily basis, until I felt like Chas, messed up and confused by Mick and Anita's game-playing in _Performance_.

"You know, Dan, I grew up in another era. Another lifetime ago. I grew up in an age when, because I was gay, my masculinity was constantly questioned, queried, even denied, by other guys; insecure guys, a lot like you. And I will say the same thing to you that I said to them: you know, an idea that cannot be challenged, cannot be tested, cannot be wrestled and argued with, that is not an idea that is held very strongly. A belief that can never be questioned is probably a belief that's full of holes, because it's never been examined properly."

"Are you trying to say it's a _good_ thing to question my masculinity, then?" I was getting that same awful feeling that I'd had, that very first night I'd met Cindy, where I felt like reality was starting to shift and bend around me. Or maybe it wasn't reality that was shifting and bending. Maybe it was me.

"I'm saying it's a pretty healthy thing, actually. Question it, examine it, work it out for yourself."

"But Dieter..." I found myself protesting, though my voice trailed off, unsure of what I wanted to articulate about my bandmate, or my insecurities about him. On so many levels, Dieter scared the shit out of me: bisexual, bi-racial, probably bipolar from his crazy moodswings, and apparently perfectly happy banging a woman who used to live as a man - a _married_ woman - even with her husband's blessing! Everything about Dieter terrified me. So why the fuck was _I_ so obsessed with him?

"Dieter has his own sense of masculinity. And it doesn't have to be the same as yours. You guys are all individuals, you guys all have very unique senses of yourselves. Which is what makes your music so strong, but is what makes it so hard for you all to get along. It's OK; accept your differences. You're allowed to be different."

I stared at Barry, trying to put it all together in my head. I thought we'd just booked studio time, but it was starting to feel like we'd signed up for two months of live-in therapy, with Barry as the head psychoanalyst. To be honest, I wasn't sure I liked it. But at that moment, Cindy and Dieter, dressed in his Victorian explorer get-up again, appeared around the corner, stuffing bottles of water and coiled rope into a rucksack.

"We're going to make one last attempt on Mount Peekamoose today," Dieter informed us breezily. "Cindy reckons the weather's been warm for a week, so the peak will be passable. It would be nice to bag the summit before we leave for England..."

I fumed as I followed Barry out to the studio, though I could not find any rational reason for my anger. Maybe it was because Dieter got to run around with the beautiful woman he appeared to be in love with, while I was cooped up in the studio, a thousand miles away from my own beloved. Or maybe Barry and his weird style of interpersonal therapy was getting at me, deep down, dredging up stuff I really didn't want to deal with.

Or maybe it was just being locked up in the studio with someone who was even more of a perfectionist than I was, making me do overdubs of guitar solos again and again and again. The pressure was getting to me, especially the next day, when Doyle came to sit in on the sessions. Doyle had said it was to show solidarity, though I suspected it was simply because he no longer felt comfortable in Dieter's company. But seeing Doyle's face behind the control desk just irritated me.

And it somehow got worse once Cindy and Dieter got on a plane for England, and left us three men in the big house by ourselves, after Old Ken knocked off work and went home for the evening. Barry was an absolute wretched cook, and Doyle only really knew how to make meat dishes like hamburgers or Sloppy Joes, so I ended up living on tubs of hummus from the Rainbow Mushroom. This was hardly the major label lifestyle I'd imagined when I'd signed up for Catskills Mansions.

How different it felt from the previous sessions. Back then, once Dieter had gone, Doyle and I had fallen to reshaping the album like gleeful children intent on making mischief. But now there seemed to be some friction between Doyle and myself that I couldn't understand, as if Doyle's lackadaisical laziness had stopped being charming and started being insanely frustrating. As I worked on the guitars, Doyle just sat at the mixing desk, scribbling away at his lyrics book, scratching out and rewriting until the lyrics sheets were indecipherable.

Finally, I had had enough of guitar overdubs and keyboard overdubs, and piano overdubs from the baby grand in the corner, and decided it was Doyle's turn to finally commit to whatever lyrics made the final cut. So Barry and Ken built an isolation booth for vocals, and faced it towards the window so that Doyle could gaze off at the Catskill High Peaks for inspiration as he sung.

Doyle was sounding good, even I had to admit. He had cut back on smoking, and the runs in the mountain air had done wonders for his lung capacity, surprising me with a new depth and resonance to his voice.

But as we started to cut vocal tracks, I felt myself growing distinctly uneasy. I never asked Doyle what his lyrics were about, it was just one of the unstated rules of the band. I wrote the music, Doyle wrote the lyrics, and Doyle's surreal poetry mixed the emotionally obvious with the obscure in ways that bent any perception of being grounded in truth or reality. Clearly, I had my own ideas what the lyrical themes of each album had been. _Lights! Camera! Action!_ had been all yearning and wish fulfilment, the frustrations of our hopeless years when success had eluded us finally giving way to a fresh rush of hope. _Semantics_ had been all brash and bold, the confidence of a young band who had started to have things _happen_ for us, the heady rush of falling in love with our own success and the new lifestyle it had brought us.

This new album, however, it was _nasty_. It was jaded and twisted and cynical, and the new emotional depth of Doyle's voice seemed to make everything sound slightly sarcastic and wearied. The narrators of Doyle's songs - I knew better than to assume that any of the songs were written from Doyle's own point of view - were unhappy in ways that women or drugs could not seem to fix. They were all yearning for something new in the face of joys that had soured, metaphors of war and car crashes and searching for hope in the wreckage of burned-out shells of bombed buildings. MVC was never going to go for this. They had signed up a young, brash, swaggering band; they did not want ennui and disillusionment. I could already hear all the arguments they'd make forming in my own head; hell, I'd listened to Bebe Newcolm talk bands through their difficult second or third albums so many times myself.

But it was _Menage_ that brought it to a head. _Menage_ , the track that everyone in the studio had already earmarked as a potential single with its monolithic, insistent drone riff and its motorik drums. But as I studied Doyle's lyric sheets, I realised that _Menage_ had become _Menage A Trois_. And the lyrics had changed, become less abstract and more obvious, that the narrator of this song - a far more transparent Doyle than I was used to seeing - was trying to convince a straying lover to cheat on her partner.

And as Doyle sang them, over and over, with more or less precision and enunciation, the words burrowed their way into my brain. It had been one of my favourite songs when we'd written it, that hammering, nerve-jangling guitar riff juddering across Dick's insistent rhythm like a juggernaut. But the more I listened to the story of the three lovers, the more Barry's words about polyamory bounced around in my head, and the more I started to wonder how much of the narrative was in Doyle's imagination, and how much of it was true.

It was the final post-solo pre-chorus bit at the end that started to nag at my ears. When we'd played the song live, Doyle just screamed inchoate nonsense, yelping out the challenger's frustration. But now the inarticulate screaming was starting to form into distinct words.

"Play that over again?" I asked Barry, after Doyle had gone downstairs to get some peppermint tea to soothe vocal chords strained by howling.

"This is sounding really good; I think he's really nailed it this time," Barry said, rewinding to the frenetic one-note guitar solo. "Here we go..."

I listened intently. "Can you isolate that vocal, please?"

"It's two vocals mixed together, but hang on..." Barry hit a couple of solo buttons, and Doyle's voice spilled out over the speakers. He muted the louder, screaming track, and left the kind of muttered, murmured vocal which echoed the main vocal like a ghost.

This time, it was distinct, what he was saying. "I wanna go to your honeyed room, I wanna taste your honeyed womb. He's inside you, but I'm your twin. It's him inside you, but let me in."

I felt my breath catch in my throat, all the air knocked out of me as if I had been punched in the solar plexus. Merry. There was no doubt in my mind. That lyric could only be about that afternoon that Doyle had walked in on us. Her honeyed womb...? That was exactly how he'd described her vagina to Auntie Beast. _I'm your twin_. It was unmistakable. Merry had been a twin, and Merry herself had said that Doyle reminded her of her own dead brother.

No, it couldn't be. The rest of the song had been written much earlier, while we were still touring _Semantics_. But then again, Doyle had rewritten the lyrics so extensively during the recording process, it was barely the same song any more. Padding over to the isolation booth, I picked up the lyric sheet and read, feeling the blood draining out of me. It was so obvious I felt a fool for not seeing it before. The three lovers in the song were myself, and Merry, and Doyle. I wanted to be sick, even as Doyle reappeared from downstairs, carrying a steaming cup of peppermint tea.

"What is this?" I demanded, confronting him with the lyric sheet.

"That is the lyric sheet to Menage, it looks like," Doyle shrugged, ever the smart-arse.

"What is this song about?" I persisted.

"It's pretty obvious. It's about infidelity, or at least, about the narrator begging a woman to commit infidelity with him. I wanted to try and explore those emotions, figure out what it would be like, to be on the outside of someone's relationship, and trying to break in."

"No, but what is this about?" I pounded the bottom of the sheet, where the lyrics about honeyed wombs were scrawled.

Doyle squinted at the words, then smiled his filthy schoolboy grin. "Why, Daniel, I happen to know for a fact that you are already intimately acquainted with the art of cunnilingus."

" _I'm your twin_ ," I read, accusingly.

"Yeah, it's a metaphor. You learned them in ninth grade English. I was there, too, remember? The suitor believes that he is a better match for the girl than her cuckolded partner."

"Merry is a _twin_ ," I pointed out, my voice icy, and suddenly Doyle seemed to clue in that I had caught onto him, pulling his head back and eyeing me warily back like a snake assuming a defensive position. For a long minute, the pair of us just stared at each other, each of our faces growing more and more sullen, before finally Doyle broke.

"You are fucking nuts, man."

"Is this, or is this not about Merry?"

"It's a fucking story, Dan!" Doyle protested. "It's a creative writing exercise. It's not real, it's a fiction, a... fantasy."

"You have written a fantasy, about oral sex with my girlfriend?"

"Old man, you need to sort out your head, because you are fucking losing it," Doyle snorted.

"I'm not..." I was on the verge at launching myself at Doyle, feeling my face flush with infuriation, when Barry stood up and stepped between us.

"Boys. I think now is a good time for a break. Daniel, I think you should go back to the house," Barry said, calmly but firmly.

"I am not going back to the house, when this man is..."

"Daniel, come with me, _now_." Barry's voice made it clear that this was an order, not a request, as he took me by the arm and lead me out the double studio doors, and down the stairs. Back to the house, Barry marched me, and took me inside and sat me down at the kitchen table. "OK, where does Cindy keep the camomile tea..."

"I don't like camomile tea," I said brattily.

"OK. Then have a glass of wine, have a hot bath, and call your girlfriend, or do whatever it is that will get you to calm down."

"How can I talk to Merry, when..." And at that moment I had the first inclination that I might actually be going crazy. But no. Whatever was going on, Merry was not implicated. I knew Merry, I knew that Merry had been revolted by the idea of Doyle watching us. This was all Doyle.

"Look, I know how it gets in the studio," Barry was telling him. "Especially when we've been at it as long as we have. And we've still got a while to go, so I need you calm, and I need you not to lose it."

"I'm not losing it! I'm..." I started to panic that I might be losing it. And now was really not the time to be losing it.

"I know the pressure that you are under. Your first album for a major label, a huge advance, an expensive studio. I know you are feeling the strain of this, but listen. You have got to let this one go. Call Merry, jerk off, do whatever it takes to get you back on track. But you have got to pull yourself together here."

Slowly, I nodded, then put my head between my hands, resting my elbows on the table. "Yeah, OK. I guess maybe I could do with a glass of wine."

"That, I do know where Cindy keeps..." Barry went into the pantry, then came back with a nice bottle of Chablis, pouring me a glass then putting the rest in the fridge to chill. "Are you going to be OK here if I go back and finish the session with Doyle?"

I nodded wearily, though I waited until Barry was gone to go upstairs and find Gabe's phone number. Of course there was no answer; they were out auditioning musicians all that week. I left a message for Merry, just saying I loved her, then tried to think of who I could call, paging though my address book. Gerry. In every other crisis, of confidence or faith in Metropolis, I had always called Gerry, knowing that the older man would patiently listen and then point me the right path to take. But Gerry was no longer my A&R guy any more. Was there anyone at MVC? I didn't even know which of the three people I dealt with on a regular basis there was officially "my" A&R and anyway, this was the kind of thing I'd have trusted with Gerry but could never take to a stranger. Taylor? Oh god no, that was the most inappropriate person to raise this with. I cringed at the thought of even playing Taylor a track with the words _honeyed womb_ in it. My sister? Oh Christ no. I was facing the most massively stressful challenge of my life, and I was on my own with it.

Wearily, I poured myself another glass of wine, then retreated upstairs to draw a bath. A few hours later, the majority of the bottle of wine down my throat, I was lying on my bed, in my bathrobe, scribbling furiously in my diary here, when there was a knock on my door.

I raised my eyes to see Doyle standing there, his hair wet from his own bath, wearing sweatpants and an old AbSynth T-shirt. I felt my face flush, though with anger or the wine, I wasn't entirely sure. "Hey," said Doyle quietly.

"Hey."

"Are you OK, old man?" I merely shrugged non-committally in reply. "Can I come in?"

"It's a free country."

Doyle entered, looking around for a seat, but the armchair by the window was mounded high with folded laundry that I hadn't bothered to put away yet. Maybe I really was losing it, if I was letting my clothes suffer neglect. "Scoot over, OK?" he asked, gesturing towards the bed. Reluctantly, I moved aside, expecting Doyle to perch on the edge of the bed, but instead Doyle sat down with his back against the foot of the brass bedstead, and swung his legs up so that we were facing each other. He craned his neck, as if trying to look over the pages of my diary, so I closed it pointedly and pushed it back under my pillow. "Man, you are always scribbling away in that thing. What are you writing, anyway."

"My diary," I explained defensively. "I want to make sure I don't forget any of this, later, when I'm old, and my grandkids ask me, like, what was it like, being in a rock band."

Doyle cracked a smile. "Am I in it?"

"Fuck off."

"OK, OK, I'll take that as a yes," he laughed, then spread his hands to show he was only joking. I just sipped my wine and watched him. "Can I have some of that?" he asked, gesturing towards my wine.

"You haven't a glass."

"I can drink from the bottle." I topped up my own glass, then handed the remainder over to Doyle. As he drank, Doyle seemed to notice something. "You have a tattoo... on your foot?" I shifted uncomfortably as Doyle bent over to read it, a smile forming on his face as he observed "Actually, that's really sweet. If it were anyone else, I'd think that was totally lame, but with you guys..."

"Merry has one, too," I insisted.

"I figured." It relieved me slightly that he merely _figured_ ; that he had not actually seen enough of Merry to know all her tattoos. "Look, about that song. We should probably talk about this."

"Yeah." I thought that really, we should have talked about it before he fucking wrote it, but that seemed too much to expect.

"In a way, you're right. It was inspired by that afternoon where I walked in on you and Merry," I finally confessed.

"So you're in love with Merry." I was now buzzed enough that I could actually say this without punching Doyle's lights out.

"Dude, no. Do you even know how songwriting works?" Doyle sputtered.

"Well, MVC seems to rate my songwriting," I snapped defensively. "As does our publishing company."

"I was talking about lyrics, about stories, about narrative," Doyle tried to explain. "It's not like..." His voice trailed off as he raised the bottle to his lips and drank. "It's not like _The Truth_. It's like an alternate universe, where you get to... explore what it would be like if these things happened. Things you would never want to do in real life... things you might never even dream of doing, were it _not_ in fiction. It's like a safe space, where you can explore emotions that you cannot experience, in your own life. Emotions like... impossible desire, and sexual jealousy."

"So you're saying you actually are jealous of Merry and me. You are saying that you have thought about... all the things you say you want to do, in that song."

"No! It's just a... It's not what I actually feel. It's just an exploration of what it would be like if I _did_ feel like that. I'm not jealous! I'm... envious... but I'm not jealous. It's purely envy."

"And what is the difference between envy and jealousy, in your mind, or in your stories, or whatever." I sipped my drink, feeling sullen and not quite drunk _enough_ for this conversation.

"I have no desire to sleep with Merry whatsoever. She is like a sister to me. And I know that she sees me as her dead twin or whatever."

"You _know_ about her dead brother?" I felt my skin go all fizzy with jealousy. It had taken Merry nearly a year to tell me, and she hadn't even told me directly, in fact it was her mother that had told me in the end. "Merry doesn't tell anyone about him."

"She only told me by accident. When she was drunk after a gig one night, years ago, she kept calling me Marcus by mistake. Of course I asked who Marcus was - I was shit scared that she might be cheating on you with some dude called Marcus, but I shouldn't have worried, really, cause I can't even imagine Merry wanting to be with anyone but you."

I shut my eyes and tried to imagine Doyle actually that worried for the state of my relationship.

"Believe me, I am not _into_ Merry. But I am hella jealous of your... your entire thing. Your relationship together. How long it's been going on, how stable it is, how much strength you both draw from it. I am jealous of the way that you two can fly apart for six months, and then just come back together and pick up exactly where you left off. I am jealous of your connection. Who wouldn't be? Why do _you_ get this amazing love affair, with your dream woman, with your soul mate... and not me?"

I stared at Doyle, and decided from the weariness and vulnerability around his eyes that this might actually be the truth. "Sometimes I don't even understand how we have it. Maybe I am just lucky. Not everyone gets to meet their soul mate, first time round. But Doyle, it's not like you haven't had amazing luck with women. You have been with... way... more... girls... than I ever..." Doyle pulled a face. "Yeah, OK, I confess, I don't understand what you're doing with Auntie Beast. But you, and women?"

"Do you want to know why I'm with Bess?"

"Heroin," I shrugged.

"Fuck off!"

"Are you going to lie to me?"

"OK, we dabble," Doyle admitted. "We smoke opium, sometimes, rolled in our joints. But that's not even it. I don't care about the drugs. There's a million places that I can get drugs in Brooklyn. It's more like... Bess is the only woman who has never _wanted_ anything from me. She doesn't give a shit whether I'm with her or not. Which somehow makes it easier to be with her."

"She doesn't want anything from you, because she's a fucking smack addict. And are you fucking kidding me? Girls just throw themselves at you."

"Yeah," admitted Doyle. "That's the problem. Girls throw themselves at me, but they always fucking want something. Even professionals offer to _do_ me for free, but Dieter's right. You don't pay them to fuck you, you pay them to leave, and if you don't pay, they find other ways to take it out of you. But even girls like your sister - your sister, who thinks the fucking Vanderbuilt-Whitneys are not good enough for her - they always _want_ something from me."

I felt my face get hot again. "Have you been with my sister?"

"I swear to you, I haven't touched your sister. And I promise to you I never will. But that's not through lack of her trying. Your sister wanted me, for her trophy downtown boyfriend. Effie wanted me for her glamourous rock star boyfriend. Jenny wanted me to help her career as a musician. Brenda wanted me to turn her life into a soap opera, and inspire her next novel. Even Sal... Sal wanted me to be a woman. And as effeminate as I am... well, never mind what I thought I wanted there. I can't be gay, it's not who I am. I tried that, and... well, we are not going to talk about what happened when I went there."

"Are we ever going to talk about that?" To be honest, I was astonished that he had ever brought it up in the first place. In nearly ten years of the band, we had never talked about sexuality, about masculinity, about any of it, until that weird night that we watched _Performance_ with Cindy, and now it was like we couldn't put the dam back in the river.

"Not right now, no." Doyle's voice sounded ragged.

"OK... you want to tell me about... Bess, then?" It was weird to think that awful woman had a name.

"Bess is the one woman who has never, ever asked a single goddamn thing from me in her life. Bess and maybe... well, maybe Merry. Merry never asks, Merry just gives me... gives all of us so much, but she never asks anything of me, because she gets everything she needs from you. I don't get that anywhere else... I don't get what you have and what you sometimes don't even seem to notice."

As Doyle stared sullenly into his wine bottle, I studied him carefully, envying those killer cheekbones, that perfect, thin, slightly concave nose, his impossibly blue eyes and his naturally straight, sandy-blond hair. I had to be honest; if I could have chosen my looks from a catalogue, I'd have chosen to look like Doyle. That mixture of all-American lantern-jawed _handsome_ and sad boy vulnerability, like a cross between James Dean and Kurt Cobain? It seemed incomprehensible to me, with those film star looks, why Doyle couldn't seem to find a girl he liked. Doyle was so fucking beautiful, that if I were a girl... But I dragged my mind away from that thought, and back to my relationship. "You know, Doyle, I wish you could..." I had been about to say _I wish you could find it, what Merry and I have got_ , but after that weird transference thing that Merry seemed to have done to Dieter, I didn't dare say the words. 

I tried another tack. "You know, I would not actually have a problem with you dating my sister, if you wanted to date Pris. Dieter - OK, I would cut his cock off. But I think you have it in you to make a woman very happy."

Doyle actually burst out laughing. "You know, no offence, Dan, I mean, your sister is pretty damn cute. She's an attractive woman, very pretty, but fucking Pris would be too uncomfortably close to fucking you, and really... _no way, no fucking way_."

"Oh. You mean you didn't come padding to my bedroom after hours because you're secretly in love with me and wanted to rock my body," I teased, pretending to unfasten my bathrobe. OK, maybe I was a little bit drunk, and two could play this game. "Is that the _real_ reason why you kept asking if I was gay?"

Doyled howled with laughter, then shook his head. "No, we've already been through this. Being gay, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not for me."

"You keep bringing it up."

"Maybe I do. Maybe I do need to talk about it..."

"In this band, Doyle, we _talk_. Remember? We don't just take pot-shots at Dieter - verbally, or with fire extinguishers - no matter how infuriating we find him." Maybe Barry was rubbing off on me a little bit. Maybe it was my turn to play therapist, with Doyle.

He chuckled dryly, but without humour, then sighed, deeply. "OK. Miami."

There was a long pause, until I repeated. "Miami."

"I was really fucked up, OK? Dieter was wiped out of his mind on coke, but I was doing speedballs. Not that that's an excuse, but..." As he scratched lazily at his arms, I nodded slowly. "Christ, the cravings for smack. It's totally fucking random what brings them on. I always thought I fell back into the habit because I was bored, and nothing else really fills the hole, but..." He stretched and looked around my room like a cornered rabbit. "Christ, this is a bad one, right now. I'm starting to understand how Dick felt. I'd inject smack into my eyeball to make this feeling go away right now."

"There's no smack within, like, a hundred miles of us, Doyle."

"I know. It'll pass, if I just keep talking." He stopped scratching and slumped back against the bedframe. "So. Dieter. I knew he was bi from the Fancy Delancey days. I won't say there was a... flirtation between us; but what there was between us was more like a power game."

"Everything with Dieter, on some level, is a kind of power game. The way to win is to refuse to play," I shrugged.

"I..." Doyle closed his eyes, too a deep breath, then ploughed on. "I was messed up, after Sal. More messed up than I thought I would be. I thought I was just... I dunno, exploring my feminine side or something, loving her but not fucking her. But I got my heart broken... Wait, well, no, not exactly. Let me rephrase that. I didn't get my heart broken, I got my pride wounded. Badly. So I stupidly thought that if I let Dieter suck my cock, that I won. Top trumps in our old power game. Dieter underneath me; he took the passive role. I fucked him, so I won."

"It doesn't work that way, does it?" I said quietly.

Doyle shook his head. "Nope. Really, he won. He seduced me. He's bisexual, but I'm not, not really. He turned me. He won; I lost. He never lets me forget that I gave in to him. And I fucking hate him for it."

I stared at Doyle, suddenly seeing all the asshole things he had said over the past few months in a new light. "So, what, if you can pretend that Merry saying she's a _male and female woman_ makes me gay, that somehow gets you off the hook for banging Dieter? Seriously, Doyle, what the fuck?"

He shrugged, but I could see it in his eyes. "I thought I was fucking Dieter. I fucked him in the fucking face. But all along, Dieter fucked me. He won."

"You really think that sex is some kind of contest, that one person does to another, a game that one person wins and the other loses when they give in? As opposed to a really fun thing that two people who are really into one another _both_ do together? Seriously, Doyle, that is fucked up." For the first time in my life, I actually felt pity for handsome and gifted yet seemingly godforsaken Doyle.

"Isn't that how it works? That's how it's always seemed to me, like one person is always the prey and the other is always the predator. Sometimes it's you, sometimes it's the other person, but..."

"OK, with me and Merry, who's supposed to be prey and who's supposed to be predator?" 

Doyle shrugged and looked defensive. "I don't know what you two get up to in bed."

"You do. In fact, you're the one man who's seen us at it. And you know it doesn't work like that. Sex isn't some game that one person wins and the other loses. There's no tally, no... scorecard. It's this amazing, beautiful thing, that two people do together to make each _other_ feel as good as possible." I was smiling now, genuinely grinning, at all the memories of amazing things Merry and I had done with one another's naughty bits. "Sex is the one place where... where both partners win! It's win-win all the time in bed!"

Doyle just stared at me in blank incomprehension. "You're going to tell me how sex works. You. Little Danny Asheton, who never even had a proper girlfriend until he was 24?"

At any other time, that might have hurt. But as I looked over to the photos of Merry that I had tucked into the corner of the mirror, I smiled. "I think I'm doing alright for myself now."

"Maybe you are. I guess maybe you are banging Firbank models on international flights back from Paris, and I'm banging my drug dealer. And you're going to tell me that this is why you are with an amazing chick like Merry Wythenshawe, and I never will be."

I shook my head slowly. "I don't see Merry... as a Firbank model. I see Merry as the girl that I have loved since I was 24, well, 22, actually, I think, the first time we met. That's like... a third of my life. And I fucking hope it's the rest of our lives, too."

"Christ, you really are an annoying little bastard." Doyle's grumpy expression slowly gave way to a wry smirk. "But really... Dan, can you trust me a little?"

"Trust you, how? I'm not sure I know how to trust you, about women, after the fucked up things you believe about sex."

"Can you trust me that my lyrics are just lyrics, no matter how fucked up they are, and that I am not in love with Merry?"

"I guess, yeah." And suddenly I realised that I meant it. It wasn't that I trusted Doyle not to fuck up, and badly. But I recognised that Doyle didn't stand a chance at getting inside what Merry and I had. I felt pity for Doyle; pity but also compassion. What I didn't feel any more, was threat.

"Are we good again?"

"I don't know," I finally confessed. "Things have been so fucked up on this session. Not just me and you, and you and Dieter. Everything on this session just feels like it's been... wrong. I don't know how else to explain it. This is everything I've ever wanted, a fancy studio, a world-famous producer, and a major label to pay for the whole thing, and everything has just gone wrong from start to finish. I just feel like things are falling apart."

"I know exactly what it is, old man," Doyle snorted. "It's staring you in the fucking face."

"Well, please tell me, because I don't see it."

"Daniel, you're not in _control_ of these sessions." Doyle finished the last of the wine, and leaned forward to put the bottle on the floor, then raised himself to see my horrified face just staring at him in shock. "Come on, dude. We all know you. Little mister control freak. Back when we were recording in Connecticut, you had Terry wrapped around your little finger, no one so much as farted in that studio that you didn't know about it. And back when we were on Musketeer... you spoke to Gerry every other goddamn day about what you wanted Musketeer to do or not do for Metropolis. You needn't tell me you have that kind of influence at MVC. I know you, you need to have your little goddamn fingers in every goddamn one of the pies in order for you to be happy. You're not in control, up here at Catskills Mansions, and that scares the shit out of you. So you meddle with everyone else."

"Dude, I do not... _meddle_ ," I insisted, completely unconvincingly.

"Yeah, you go ahead and tell yourself that," Doyle chuckled. "Do you mind if I smoke in here?"

I was about to protest, then realised if I said no that Doyle would disappear downstairs and take the warm air of intimacy with him. "Go ahead."

"Thanks, old man." He found the wine bottle again, and flicked ash into it. "We all know you, Dan, we all know that's what you do, and we've kind of accepted it by now. But... I suppose we all have our roles in this band, don't we? You're the organised one, the boss, the fucking Chairman of the Board, our own personal little meddler. Dieter's the creative one, our ideas man, he's the one that comes up with all our best shit, even when we're just taking the piss out of him. And me? Me, I'm just... _cute_." He held his cigarette at an angle, staring down at it as its smoke curled a wreath around his face, lending his angelic good looks a moody chiaroscuro.

"You are fucking kidding me, right?" I said, sipping the wine I'd been saving as I looked over at Doyle's almost impossibly beautiful face. "You'd rather not be so damn good-looking? You'd rather be too short and too skinny, with a crooked nose and shit hair?"

"I think people might take me more seriously, if I were." Doyle sucked at his cigarette with the same urgency he'd sucked at the bottle.

"Doyle, if I looked like you, I'd be on the fucking cover of GQ every month, just admiring myself," I heard my voice saying. I was drunker than I thought, if I was admitting this.

"On the cover of GQ." Doyle shook his head slowly. "Not on the cover of Guitar Player Magazine, not on the cover of Time Magazine, certainly not on the cover of the London Review of Books."

"Why would you want to be on the cover of the London Review of Books, anyway?" I asked, perplexed. "Have you written a novel during our downtime or something?"

Doyle looked up at me and fixed me with a penetrating expression. "Do you know, today is the first time, in the ten years we've been in a band together, that you have actually asked me, what my lyrics mean?"

"That's deliberate. I don't step on your toes, you don't step on mine. I don't expect you to ask me what my guitar solos _mean_."

"i would just like to be taken seriously, once in a while, you know? I resent being treated as just the pretty one who doesn't really do anything."

"You write the lyrics. That's hardly nothing. And you are the face of the band, when it comes down to it. You're in the middle of the stage, you front our videos..."

"Again, that's what I'm talking about. There are a lot of days, I'd really rather not be the face of the band. If it were up to me, I'd really rather not be in the videos at all."

I ventured a crooked grin. "You really are Merry's twin, aren't you?"

Doyle just laughed and tossed his cigarette butt into the bottom of his empty wine bottle. "You're not going to give me a break on that, are you?"

"Alright, I'll give you a break, if you tell me one thing."

"What's that." Doyle was smiling at me like we were best friends again.

"What was it like?"

The smile started to fade. "What was what like?"

"What was it like, banging Dieter?" I couldn't believe I'd actually had the courage to ask the question until I heard the words hanging in the air between us.

"Wow," said Doyle quietly. "That's a... that's a pretty fucked up question, Dan."

"I'm serious. Like, what is the hold that he has over people? You know as well as I do, it is almost spooky how Dieter manages to pull. So, y'know, what's he like? What's the big deal? Is sex with Dieter as amazing as he and... you know, the groupies, and the website, and everything... all make out that it is?" Was this what Barry had meant, by interrogating my masculinity? But in a way, Dieter had always been my bete noir. He was the guy I always compared myself against, when I thought of a yardstick of masculinity and male sexuality, the 6'2" slab of guy I always came up short in comparison against.

Doyle screwed up his eyes and made a face. "I don't know, Dan. It was just a blow job, OK? I barely remember it, we were so fucked up. I... yeah, alright, it was pretty good. Is that what you want to hear?"

"Just alright? Just ' _pretty good_ '?" I almost laughed with relief. The great Dieter, sex god of the Lower East Side, was only _alright_ in bed?

"Yeah, he was pretty good. _Really_ good, in fact. In terms of blow jobs, definitely top five I've ever had in my life," Doyle conceded. "And he's a fucking amazing kisser, I'll give him that. He knows what he's doing with his mouth. That thing he does with his tongue? It's amazing."

I stared at Doyle, feeling my stomach twisting in ways I did not want to acknowledge.

"But you know what it is with Dieter?" Doyle continued. "It's his sheer fucking carnality. He makes no apologies for what he is, or what he wants. He is just so fucking _into_ sex, in all its forms, in all its varieties, that, like, Dieter's total carnality gives his partners... permission to submit to their own desires. It's very freeing, in a weird way." His voice trailed off as he looked off into the carpet, the expression on his face moving from fear and shame to some kind of understanding.

"In a way, Doyle, I envy you," I just about whispered, and I knew then I must have been drunk, because I would never have admitted that sober. Hell, we'd never have had this conversation, sober.

"Why?" Doyle looked up at me abruptly. "You'd never in a million years let Dieter or any other dude come anywhere near your cock."

"Yes, you're absolutely right. And I'd never try heroin, and I never even tried to swim out as far as the spit, out at Martha's Vineyard. I am always too sensible. And you know why I don't bang groupies, really? Because I am fucking _scared_ to. You're right, I always have to be in control. You have the courage to get into these situations I'd never encounter in a million years..."

"I don't know if it's courage," Doyle snickered. "More like stupidity. I'm too dumb to know when to come in out of the rain."

"And I guess that's what I envy. Because you, at least, are really living, out there in the rain, when I might stay dry, but I've missed out on half of life, through fear of getting wet."


	40. Menage A Quatre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Merry returns to NYC with her new band, to shop for a label, Daniel starts to worry about how their social circles - and their lives - seem to be drifting apart.
> 
> Metropolis finally finish their difficult third album, _Mountaineering_ , and start to plan the press campaign and tour to accompany its upcoming release. The band, however, are also drifting apart, and struggle to fit it all in around their extracurricular activities. Dieter - and his extravagant new moustache - has become very serious about his mountain-climbing activities. While Dick has bought an artisanal cattle farm in Texas, and is planning to open a "Heritage Beef Bar" in Brooklyn with two of The Stakes. Can Daniel corral his wayward band back together long enough for a world tour?
> 
> Content warning: you will, by now, have come to expect the stupid microaggressions that fall out of Daniel's mouth whenever he is around trans people or People of Colour. This chapter is no exception.

Spring slid into summer, and finally we finished the recording portion of the sessions. Nearly six months, it had taken us, three times as long as the second album, and more than five times as long as the first. By the time it was done, I never wanted to go back into another recording studio ever again. And yet we still had the arduous task of mixing the thing ahead of us. Barry told us to take the rest of July off, go back to the City, live a little, enjoy ourselves, go on vacation or whatever, and then we regroup in August, when we'd be glad of the cool mountain air, to mix the damn thing.

My first thought was to fly to England to see Merry, but much to my delight, she emailed and told me that her new band was coming over to New York to play some showcase gigs, shopping for a record label. Although I knew she was excited and very pleased with the way that her new band was developing, she had been quite mysterious about it and not told me many details, so I was super stoked to hear what they sounded like!

I took the train out JFK to meet her, full of nervous energy and excitement at the idea of finally holding my girlfriend in my arms again after so many months apart. As I stood in the arrivals lounge, I craned my neck, looking through the crowd for that long, silky yellow hair, disappointed that I couldn't see her. Had she been held up at customs, if she'd brought her bass on the plane? And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, someone assaulted me. For a second, I thought it was a crazed fan, throwing their arms around me and almost lifting me off my feet, knocking the breath out of me. I abruptly recalled that awful conversation I'd had with Dieter in the Rainbow Mushroom. Was this how it started, the endless, awful personal invasions, with a physical assault at JFK?

And then I smelled the stranger, and realised it was Merry. Holding her by the elbows, I drew back and stared at her. Her hair, it was completely gone. She didn't just have short hair, she had a pixie cut, with a few tufts at her forehead and wisps in front of her ears, but other than that, there wasn't a hair on her head that was longer than one of my own. In fact, after several months upstate, my shaggy hair was much longer than hers. "You've cut your hair," I managed to sputter, trying to get my head around the fact that this adorable pixie-stranger was my own girlfriend.

"Oh my god, do you hate it?" Merry sighed, insecurity flashing across her eyes along with the obvious jet lag.

As I looked her over, taking in her dimples, her sea-green eyes, a smile spread slowly over my face. "Actually, you look quite a lot like Jean Seberg in _À Bout De Souffle_."

"Is that good or bad?" she asked, as she extracted herself from my embrace and retrieved a trolley loaded with two suitcases and her bass.

"You are talking to a man who did his university dissertation on the influence of 20th Century Philosophy on French New Wave Cinema, with an eye to Jean-Luc Godard. I have seen _À Bout De Souffle_ probably over a hundred times." I took her hand as we made our way towards the taxi stand. "I used to have the most... enormous crush on Jean Seberg. Do you not remember my poster of her in my apartment on Ludlow Street? Is that where you got the idea?" I could not stop staring at her, astonished at how much younger and cuter and more elfin she looked without the weight of all that hair around her face.

"Oh god, I had forgotten. Actually it was Cindy's idea; new image, fresh start. I didn't want to be the girl with the long blonde hair any more. I wanted to be more androgynous; boyish, even."

Of course that had been Cindy's idea. But maybe Doyle and Dieter were right. If this was Merry as a boy; fuck yeah, I fancied Merry as a boy. "You look stunning. You'll knock them dead, I reckon." I loaded her suitcases into the trunk of a cab, but she had to sit with the bass case between her legs. It was a good thing she did, or else I wouldn't have trusted myself not to molest her during the long ride home, settling for holding her hand and playing with her fingers instead, pulling them into my mouth and rubbing them against my lips in anticipation.

But the biggest change from the girlfriend who had left was not her hair. Really, she seemed more like herself again, bouncy and enthusiastic, overflowing with excitement about her new band. She refused to play me a CD, wanting me to wait and see them perform. But her energy and her excitement were infectious, and I felt myself lifted by her mood. Yes, this was definitely what I had needed. Normally, I would have been vaguely annoyed and competitive that she hadn't really asked about my band - well, actually she had, but I had turned evasive and said that I didn't want to think about it for the entire month of July. But I was actually glad of the distraction, and the luxury of not having to think about Metropolis, but just immerse myself in music that I had no personal stake in.

And the sex. Christ, immersing myself in sex again, after months of enforced celibacy. When we got home, I saw that Merry had set aside two days in her day planner that just said "SHAG DANNY SENSELESS!" I started to laugh, before pulling her into an embrace, enjoying the feeling of being able to nuzzle her neck without getting a mouthful of hair.

"Do we have to go out and get your strange condoms?" I worried, even before I started to pull her clothes off. "The last box will have expired by now."

"It's OK, I'm on the Pill now."

"The Pill?" I pulled back to look at her, actually slightly disappointed that she hadn't volunteered to play our sexual roulette game. But then again, both of us were about to go into touring a new project. This was no time for even playing with the potential of a baby. "I thought you couldn't take contraceptive pills?"

"You can get a Pill in Europe that's a slightly different chemical formula. Progesterone only, super low dose or something, seems like it's less disruptive to my health. I've actually been OK on it." 

I frowned, and wondered why she'd finally decided to go on The Pill right at this moment, when she knew she would be spending six months away from me. And jeez, if we could have just done this all along, instead of bothering with those weird rubbery organic condoms, though really, after a while, I'd started to have a slightly fetishy conditioned sexual response just to the smell of those things. But as her fingers found the knot of my tie and started to slowly loosen me, I forgot to even ask, and it was a slight relief not to have to bother with prophylactics, sinking into the moist warmth of her body, skin against skin, in a way that always drove me wild. And as I lay afterwards, just holding her in my arms, reacquainting myself with how perfectly her body fit into my embrace, I was just too happy to spoil it with any weird jealousy. Doyle had been right. That weird, compulsive terror of losing her; when she was lying safe in my arms, with a dribble of our mingled juices drying on her upper thighs, even the memory of it just felt _nuts_. There was nothing in this world that I felt more sure of than my love for Merry, and Merry's love for me, especially as we played footsie in bed, looking down at our toes to see how our tattoos had faded and weathered over the years.

 

\----------

 

Merry's first solo gig was an industry showcase down at Tramps, a venue big enough to be respectable, but small enough not to be too intimidating. I was allowed to attend, but not allowed at soundcheck, she'd teasingly told me, as she and her band needed to get in the right _headspace_ for their performance. I said fine, I'd bring Doyle along as my date, and we'd go to dinner beforehand. Doyle was actually quite excited about the invitation, and tried to tempt me out to Williamsburg to check out the cool street food scene he said was going on out there, but I put my foot down with the insistence of a lifelong Manhattanite: No Brooklyn.

But really, I realised it was a sign of how well I'd repaired my friendship with Doyle, that I felt able to bring him to Merry's gig, without so much as a whiff of anxiety. In fact, I was even OK with it when Doyle turned up with his trademark floppy blond hair cropped into a worryingly familiar pixie cut, though his bangs were brushed straight up, like Tin-Tin, instead of down across his forehead like Merry's. 

I stared at his hair as he emerged from the 23rd St subway. "Dude, what is this?"

"I washed it and it shrank," shrugged Doyle in his typical smart-ass tone. "It's a haircut, Dan. I do believe you are familiar with the concept, given certain bills you charged to the band's account during our KROQ photoshoot?"

"It's Merry's haircut."

"Yup. It looked so good on her, I thought I might give it a go." Doyle's eyes flashed, like he was testing me, like he wanted to know if I would pick up the obvious challenge. Was it weird that my singer seemed so intent on spookily resembling my girlfriend? I didn't really want to think about what it meant. So instead I just shook my head, then reached up and tousled his bangs to provoke a flurry of him trying to fix his look in a shop window. I could let this one slide.

Doyle and I grabbed dinner at an Indian restaurant in Murray Hill than headed over to Tramps, impressed by the queue that had already gathered outside. Although we tried to elbow our way in by saying we were on the guest list, we were informed that since it was an industry only show, everyone was on the guest list, and we had to join the queue.

But when I got to the front, I blinked at the familiar shock of curly ginger hair overhanging the all-important clipboard that guarded the guest list. "Sandra?"

She looked up from The List at the sound of my voice, and grinned. "Danny!" We flung our arms around one another in a warm hug, but then she thumped me. "What the hell are you even doing in the queue? You know you could just go in."

"Tell that to the gorilla," I moaned, rolling my eyes as I glanced back at the security guard still patrolling the queue. "But still... what the hell are _you_ doing here?"

Sandra just grinned. "I met them in London. It was so fucking cool, like, I had no idea - I knew Merry was amazing, but I had no idea..." Her eyes were huge and round and starstruck, like, it was kind of adorable how long Sandra had been working in the music industry, and still got starstruck by her favourites. "So when she asked Emma and I if we wanted to do PR for her new band, oh my god, we jumped at that chance."

"So you're doing press for Merry now," I repeated aloud, wondering why she hadn't told me. These girls of mine, they were devious.

"Yes, and you need to get the hell in and stop holding up the queue because seriously, they are going on in seven minutes, and I need to get all of these people in, so I will talk to you inside, OK?" Sandra insisted, stamping my hand, and Doyle's, before hurrying me inside.

"OK, OK." So I didn't even get a chance to wish Merry good luck before she went on, as we were barely able to get inside and grab a couple of beers, when suddenly the lights went down and the band came on.

White light filled the stage, blinding us momentarily, and when the afterimages faded, the band were just standing there, as still as statues. Merry was front and centre, holding her 6-string bass up high like a guitar, with Gabe behind her on a kit that was half acoustic and half electronic sample pads. On either side of Merry were two people standing in front of keyboards, a small Asian woman in a draped, black dress on her left, and to the right, a slim, androgynous black man in a fitted rude boy suit and a porkpie hat.

The drums started first, a tight, sinuous funk groove, followed by sharp, angular retorts on the keyboards, bouncing back and forth, panned hard stereo. When Merry started to play bass, she didn't play it down low like a funk bassline, as she let a low, dirty, octave-hopping synth take over. She played it like a fuzz-drenched lead guitar. And as she played, she swung her shoulders back and forth, in an odd, disjointed motion, which had to be intentional, because the two keyboard players mirrored her motions almost perfectly. She stepped back, tripped, no, wait, she had only pretended to trip, as all three of them had tripped, righted themselves, then spun round in tiny circles before making it back to their microphones to start singing.

It was then, as the voices rang out, and they were so clearly a 3-part girl group harmony, that I did a double take at the small black man. Now I was confused. It was so obviously a man, in fact, he had a moustache, but as he swooped and turned for another dance routine, it also became increasingly obvious that there were the shadow of breasts beneath his tight silk shirt. OK, that had got to be Cindy's doing, just fucking with people's heads on the whole gender thing.

Next to me, Doyle was actually dancing, swinging his hips around and tossing his head like an overexcited puppy. "This is awesome," he shouted in my ear. "This is like, Talking Heads meets early Prince at a Can gig. I had no idea she had it in her."

"I heard demos she wrote ages ago. I always knew she was really the talented one in Deltawave," I shouted back.

As the song kicked up another gear, white light flooded the stage again, but this time, the walls seemed to flicker, bend and start to melt in response to the white heat. Wait, no, that was a projection, I realised, as the melting ran into patterns and the patterns formed into an ornate dance in perfect synch with the moves that the three front people were executing. Turning my head, I looked back towards the projection booth at the rear of the room, saw Mandy, and waved. Cindy, Sandra, Mandy... Had Merry got everyone from the old gang involved in her solo project but me?

After about 2 or 3 more songs, even I gave up pretending I wasn't dancing. I saw the flash of green glass and looked up to see bottles of beer appear in front of my and Doyle's hands as if by magic, then heard a familiar girlish laugh, and turned to see Cindy. As we hugged hello, she hollered in my ear. "Well, I guess I don't have to ask you two if you're enjoying it."

"This is fantastic," I agreed, feeling my heart swell with pride. The next song was a quiet one, a bit of a ballad with lush, almost symphonic keyboard washes, so I pulled Cindy aside to talk. "But Cindy... I have to ask you. The keyboard player on the right..."

"They're great, aren't they?" Cindy nodded her head in time to the music.

"Yeah, they're both amazing musicians. But, for real. The one on the right..." I persisted. One of Cindy's eyebrows started to creep up her forehead as she turned towards me. "Is that a boy or a girl?"

Cindy snorted, eyeing me dismissively, but then she seemed to relent and shook her head. "Don't know, haven't asked."

"So that wasn't your idea..." I probed.

" _What_ wasn't my idea?" Cindy stalled, and I felt like, come on, don't make me have to spell this out, Cin.

"I mean, you know. He... she..." I tripped over the pronouns, unsure of myself. "That person is like you _._ Y'know.... _different?_ "

"You mean Black," laughed Cindy. "You can say it, Dan. Go on... _Blaaaaack_." She enunciated the word clearly, teasing me as if to make a point, as if she was enjoying watching me squirm.

"No, I meant..." I was grasping for words, my face flushing as I tugged at the collar of my tie. What was the word that Merry had used? But Cindy was just watching me squirm, with a slightly cruel grin on her orchid-coloured lips. Christ, she was worse than Dieter!

But finally she took pity on me, feigning surprise as she covered her mouth with one hand. " _Oh_ , you mean, that person might be transgender?"

"Yeah," relief flooded my face, as I felt like a butterfly that had finally been released from its pin. "That's the one. I mean... So you didn't hire... that dude on purpose, like you wanted to make a point? About... I dunno. Diversity or whatever." Cindy said nothing, tapping her fingernail against her lips patiently as she studied me, smiling that tight-lipped smile like she wasn't actually angry, she just wanted to fuck with me, and I knew it was time to squirm again. "Come on, Cin... _two..._ transengendered or whatever..." I stumbled over the unfamiliar word "People, in _one_ band? That's a hell of a coincidence. It's hard to believe you didn't plan that."

Cindy paused, her eyes flickering around the room, to Doyle, who was now chatting amicably with Duncan and Duncan's girlfriend. "When you hired Duncan, as a keyboard player, you didn't think it was a _hell of a coincidence_ , that you already had _three_ straight white dudes in a band, and you hired one more?"

"No!" I protested, sputtering at the way that Cindy always seemed to twist everything I said into a goddamn social justice lesson. "Look, we were lucky to get Duncan. After we'd had such trouble with PCPete, and we had literally one week to find a new keyboard player before we left on tour, and Duncan, for real, he was the best guy that turned up to our auditions. He was just miles better than any other option that was open to us."

Cindy smiled triumphantly and folded her arms across her chest. "Those two were the best people that turned up to our auditions. They were just miles better than all of the other candidates, in every aspect that Merry and Gabe told me they were looking for. They're a couple, the two keyboard players. Came as a set. They played well, they had style, they had the right aesthetic, they knew how to dance... and they're choreographers as well as musicians. which, as soon as Merry heard that, she was all over it, because she wanted to integrate dance into the performance. They even run an Electroclash club night in London - so they were totally up for starting an art-music-dance-performance thing."

"Electro- _what_?" I shouted back in her ear as the next song shattered into life, confused as to how I'd been out of the music scene for so long that there seemed to be whole new musical _movements_ I'd never heard of. But, with some considerable relief, it became too loud for conversation as Merry launched into another juddering fuzz bass solo that seemed to squiggle and dance like a bolt of lightning. Christ, I thought, Dieter would kill for that New Order tinged magic she was weaving. And then, with that thought, I craned my head and looked around for Cindy's erstwhile playmate, but he was nowhere to be seen. When the song shimmered back into a quiet bit, I tapped Cindy on the shoulder again. "What have you done with our bassist, anyway?"

Cindy rolled her eyes, but smiled indulgently, and there was a softness I had not expected behind the tough facade that had been busting my chops for the past twenty minutes. "New York's dead, darling," she teased in a pitch-perfect imitation of Dieter's sneer. "He's signed on for an expedition to climb across the Alps on foot, culminating with an ascent of Mont Blanc."

"Mont Blanc," I echoed, shaking my head as I heard Doyle burst into laughter at the idea. Was it just me, or did Doyle seem to magically appear back at my side the moment any of us started discussing Dieter?

"Look, I have come to accept that if you're Dieter's lover, you are always going to share him with someone or something. I could myself lucky that it's mountains, these days," Cindy shrugged prettily. "A mountain makes a hell of better Other Woman than drugs."

 _Lover_. I stared at Cindy carefully. That was a word that Dieter had always avoided like the plague. Friends with benefits. Playmate. Fuck-buddy. Date. Dieter had a million terms for the girls - and boys - that he slept with, but I'd never heard him call anyone his lover before. "So he's pretty serious about this..." I paused for a heartbeat, wondering what I was really asking. "...mountaineering thing?"

Cindy's lip curled up into that I-got-your-number smile, like she knew exactly what I was _really_ asking. "Yes, I believe he is."

I sighed deeply. "Can't wait to explain this in the next round of interviews... What's the next Metropolis album about? Mountaineering and Polyamory. Fantastic."

"Maybe we should call the album..." Doyle quipped.

"Don't even," I laughed, punching him on the arm.

"This is fucking amazing, isn't it?" shouted a Geordie accent in my ear, and I turned to see Sandra standing beside me, staring up at Merry with something approaching hero-worship. "I cannot believe how good they are. Like, I loved Deltawave, but this... this is like... well cool!"

I smiled and gave Sandra a little squeeze, wrapping my arm around her shoulders. There was just something about knowing how long she'd had a fangirl crush on me that made it super-enjoyable to shamelessly flirt with her. "I'm glad you love them, but don't you forget that our album is coming out in a few months, and we're your first priority."

"Come on," laughed Sandra. "Metropolis albums practically sell themselves at this point. I don't have to do a damn thing any more. But this... selling a change of direction this new and exciting, this is going to be a challenge. An amazing challenge. I'm up for it!"

We watched the band for a bit, but I found it hard to concentrate, my attention divided and distracted. Like, obviously, I was a devoted boyfriend, and Merry's biggest fan, and I could not take my eyes off my girlfriend, up on the stage, mesmerised by her new music and her new band. But at the same time, I could not stop myself from being curious about Cindy - about Cindy and Dieter, and what it _meant_ \- but also about Cindy and Barry, like this thing with Dieter seemed like it was a hell of a lot more serious than Barry realised.

"So I would have expected Barry to be here," I probed delicately during the next lull. "Surely he's going to be producing their debut, right?"

Cindy shook her head quickly. "Nah, Barry passed on them."

"What?" I sputtered, surprised, but at the same time slightly relieved. "Though I guess that's good if he's not going to cut short our session to rush into recording Merry." A pause as the music onstage whirled up into a frenetic disco break-down that had me itching to throw off my suit jacket and dance. "I'm surprised, though, this music seems totally this thing."

"Oh, he loves the music," Cindy assured me. "Merry sent over one of their demos, and Barry was knocked out by it. But he also - quite rightly - pointed out, that they don't need him any more."

"What do you mean, they don't need Barry? Barry's an amazing producer," I protested. "I mean, he made us sound great - even when we've been at each other's throats."

"Yeah, see that's it. You guys, right now, you _need_ Barry. And that's what Barry's interested in - creative tension, that spark of genius that arises from conflict. Barry could produce any band in the world if he wanted to - but he's most interested in the ones that need him to mediate their conflict. I think in a way, he missed his calling, he should have been a psychiatrist or a therapist. His parents are both shrinks, you know. So he'd totally be in his element running encounter groups up at Esalen. Because he's so interested in creative conflict, and how to resolve it. But Merry and her new band - they're all _friends_. They adore each other! They're still in the crush stage of a band. There's no tension there for Barry to work with, they all just respect and get on with each other, they hang out together, they go clubbing and stay up all night talking about how awesome they're going to be." Up onstage, in reflection of her words, I saw a tiny smile pass between Merry and Gabe, her eyebrows raised in expectation as a cue, just before he counted her in, and the rhythm changed, the disco-funk giving way to an extended oceanic wash of synths.

"So that's it, that's why Barry passed on us, all those years ago at the Luna Lounge? Because Dieter and Doyle and I got on too well? Wait... is _that_ why he wanted to work with us now? Now that Dieter and Doyle hate each other and I... I..."

"Look sweetie, I gotta go. This is the last song, and I have to be backstage when Merry gets offstage. Get a cab to the aftershow, OK? Sandra knows where it is, she can give you directions." A smear of orchid lipstick across my cheek and Cindy was gone, leaving me wondering how different my life could have been, had one fateful blow-job happened about five years earlier.

We all ended up at an aftershow party, at the Chelsea Hotel of all places, which Cindy had deliberately chosen for its associations with both artists and sexual depravity. And so Doyle and I found ourselves stuffed into a rather seedy hotel room with dozens of record company people and music journalists and other assorted schmoozers and hangers-on. Cindy and Sandra, between the two of them, seemed to have opened up their address books and invited everyone who was anyone in the entire city. When the band arrived, about twenty minutes after the rest of us, a genuine New York ripple went through the room. It was crazy; the room was now rippling for Merry the way it had once rippled for _Matthew_ and _Karen_. I didn't even get a chance to kiss my congratulations on Merry's lips, she was dragged off to meet the editor of the Village Voice or someone, but soon we saw a familiar face, Doyle's old high school buddy, heading through the crowd towards us. It was great to see Gabe again, as us three lads hugged and Doyle clapped his congratulations on the drummer's back, shouting how much he loved the new band.

"It's great, isn't it." Gabe beamed. "It's much more... _us_ than Deltawave ever were. I feel like I don't have to fight to get my ideas heard any more. We've just been having the greatest time, hanging out in East London and smoking weed and listening to loads of West African pop. You know, the shit Elisha would never let us listen to on the bus. But my god, we are just so happy again, and having such fun being in a band again. I had forgotten."

"Your keyboardists are great," I bellowed over the noise of the party. "The little Japanese one, she's fucking awesome! I'd like to talk to her about her pedals, but does she speak English?"

"I'm from Hong Kong, actually, and I went to British schools for 12 years, thanks to Colonialism, so hopefully you can understand me just fine," retorted an irate voice behind me, and I wanted to sink through the floor as I turned to see the very woman standing a step behind Gabe.

For a moment, I was going to protest that I hadn't meant it like that, but then I caught a glimpse of Merry, eyeing me with that stern but slightly bemused expression that meant I was in trouble if I didn't backpedal immediately. That whole conversation with Cindy had made me realise - I might not be getting any better about being so politically incorrect, but I was getting a hell of a lot better at apologising. "I am so sorry," I stuttered with my most sincere face. "That was a hideously presumptuous thing to say, and you have my unreserved apologies."

The woman raised an eyebrow at me, and for a moment, I almost feared for my safety, but then she shrugged and seemed to let it pass. "I'm Dolores, and the effects unit you're probably interested in is a polyphonic octave generator. It adds pre-programmable harmonics to any tone, in order to make it sound like an organ."

"Hi. I'm Daniel, Merry's... boy-thing. Does that pedal work on a guitar, though?" I wondered, remembering the eBow.

"They were designed for guitars, so I guess it's cheating a little to use it on an actual organ..." Dolores smiled at her own naughtiness. "Kinda like, what would happen if you engaged the hyperspace jump-point when you were already in hyperspace..."

"Oh, don't get her started on sci-fi." The other keyboardist, that person of indeterminable gender, had just joined us, and I found it hard not to stare, even knowing I would probably get a bollocking from Merry.

"My partner, JohnRoger," Dolores explained.

I stuttered a greeting and shook the person's hand, knowing I should say something in order not to seem rude, but my head was blank as I tried to smile benignly. No, don't look at their face, their moustache, wait, no, don't look down at their chest either. I looked around for Doyle, for backup, but he had disappeared off to gossip with Branwell Cortes, who had joined his brother at the bar, leaving me to handle this on my own. But before the panic took hold, I noticed that this peculiar individual was still wearing that beautifully tailored rude-boy suit at the aftershow. Suits. OK, I could do suits. "I've been admiring the cut of your jacket," I managed to compliment. "May I enquire as to the name of your tailor?"

JohnRoger beamed with pleasure. Clearly that had been the right thing to say. "I have a gentleman on Saville Row. I can find you his card, if you're really interested. And your own? The cut of your trousers is so daring!"

"This? Oh, this is Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme," I explained, holding back the lapel of my blazer to show the label. "I kind of... uh, model for them."

"I could tell by the shoes, that you are a gentleman of quality. Square-toed Chelsea boots, very chic."

"They're totally my signature look." I raised my knee to show off my shoes. "I've got tricky sized feet - very narrow - so I've been having them handmade. My cobbler gives me an extra inch or two on the heel... useful when I'm around Merry."

JohnRoger laughed with an understanding nod. "That is very useful indeed. She's so damn tall, Dolores and myself have been standing on blocks to get our heads even for the videos. If I might ask you for the number for your cobbler..."

Doyle reappeared and asked if he could get anyone drinks. "Sure," I replied. "I'm still on the Peroni, but my friends..." I turned to Dolores and JohnRoger to see what they were drinking. "She's having a glass of white wine and..." I suddenly found myself stumbling over how the hell to refer to Merry's new bandmate, turning and quietly asking. "I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be rude, but how do I do this?"

Luckily, JohnRoger took no offence. "They," they supplied with a friendly smile. "My pronouns are they, and them. And they are having a Peroni, as well, but thank you for asking, Daniel. I appreciate your not making any assumptions."

"It's cool. _Them_. Like Van Morrison. I like it," I found myself sounding out. I was surprised how easily it rolled off the tongue. And so JohnRoger and I found ourselves becoming instant friends. It was kinda weird, but... in a way I was starting to get used to the fact that all of Merry's friends seemed to be, well, a bit _off_.

Off? Christ, I would catch it from Merry if she heard me saying that, and man could I ever see the side-eye Cindy would give me. I didn't mean _off_ , just... Weird? No, not even weird. Just... _different_. Well, what I meant was, so many of Merry's friends seemed to be gay, or a confusing gender, or Black, or Asian, or... No. Wait. Looking over at Doyle chatting with Branwell as they grabbed an armload of drinks, Cindy's words echoed in my head, and I realised how odd it was that all of my _own_ friends were white, and male, and straight, and upper middle class, and all about 30 years of age. I had never actually noticed before, how my friends were all so similar they seemed to vary only in the colour of their hair. Doyle being blond and Branwell being ginger were about as diverse as my lot got. Was it actually _my_ friends that were weird for being so homogenous?

After about half an hour, Doyle got the fear in the claustrophobic space, saying the Chelsea Hotel even smelled of heroin, but to my immense relief, instead of getting weird, he simply made his polite excuses and grabbed a ride back to Brooklyn with Branwell and Duncan. I looked around for my girlfriend, but Merry had to work. She would come and stand by my side for a few minutes, accepting my kisses and my compliments, but she was there to scout a record deal, not to flirt with me, so Cindy or Sandra kept dragging her off to meet Important People. I hung back and got slowly drunk with JohnRoger and Gabe, both of whom kept me steadily up to date with the state of the British football season, refusing to believe that any English man could be uninterested in the footie. 

But mostly... well, the rest of the evening felt weird. Once my crew - Doyle and the Cortes Brothers - had left, it was starting to become painfully obvious how far apart my and Merry's social worlds were drifting. Once upon a time, Metropolis and Downtime had had exactly the same audience, hell we'd played so many gigs together back in the East Village at dive bars like Brownie's and the Mercury Lounge. But Downtime had become Deltawave, and taken off for stratospheric heights almost overnight, while Metropolis had undergone that long, hard slog of the indie darling grind.

But now it seemed like our positions had reversed yet again - Metropolis was on a major label, and I felt painfully out of touch with the hip, arty, downtown crowd that Merry's new band had attracted. Everybody seemed to be gay, everybody was dressed in that ostentatious, super-fabulous fashiony kind of style, everyone was doing air kisses and calling one another 'sweetie darling' like minor characters in AbFab. Merry was loving it, she was eating up the flattery, laughing and blushing as the Pet Shop Boys' new costume designer told her she was fast on her way to becoming a _Gay Icon_. Gay Icon? Well, it was just one more role in Merry's chameleon wardrobe, I supposed, along with Supermodel, Bass Player, Pop Star and Indie Rocker's Girlfriend. But where did this Gay Icon business leave any room for me?

It was well past 4 in the morning when we finally left, and I bundled my exhausted and still slightly jet-lagged girlfriend into a taxi downtown. The sky was starting to glow faintly pink over Brooklyn as our taxi slid down the avenue towards the Lower East Side, as Merry turned to me, her eyes red-rimmed, and asked "Well, I've heard the opinion of everybody else in the world, darling, but what did you think?"

I was tired, distracted, and didn't answer immediately, my attention caught by trying to discern the glow of the dawn's early light from the general NYC light pollution. And I sensed Merry pull away slightly, hurt, as I realised she was expecting an answer. "Oh, it was amazing. Your new band are so... different."

I meant it as a compliment, but Merry frowned. "Different? Oh god, you hate it."

"I do not hate it," I stuttered. "I thought it was incredible. Absolutely amazing. Ask Cindy how hard me and Doyle were dancing down the front."

"You were chat-chat-chatting away with Cindy every time I looked for you," Merry said quietly.

"Yeah, telling her how awesome I thought you guys were!" I insisted, relieved that it wasn't even a lie. "And getting the goss on what producer you were going to work with..."

Merry rolled her eyes and did an exhausted little laugh. "You can take the boy out of the music business, but you can not take the music business out of the boy. Of course you were schmoozing."

"I'm just... interested. Interested and concerned about getting what's best for you. It is different, which could be both a blessing or a curse, because you know what a herd mentality the music business has in this town. But I'm glad that it's different. The Lower East Side scene is so fucking played out - a million bands trying to be Metropolis or Stakes clones, it's so boring. You're doing something genuinely fresh and original. The Scene never could catch up with you. Never. The music is different, the sound is different, even the band is... different." Merry's face started to get that suspicious look I'd been facing all evening on Cindy's face. "In a completely amazing way. I really like the people in your new band. It's a good mix."

Merry brightened slightly, despite the dark circles of exhaustion blooming underneath her eyes, and I felt the reassuring pressure as she leaned back into my embrace. "We wanted balance, really. We wanted to be in a band that was not the same-old same-old. We talked it over - we talked it to death, maybe, Gabe and me - what we did and specifically did not want in our next band. And we found we were pretty much in agreement about what we didn't want. Ideally, we kinda wanted to be in a band that was 2 boys, 2 girls; 2 gays, 2 straights; 2 Black people, 2 White people."

"The old 2-Tone ideal," I said, thinking to myself, y'know, so much for Cindy's protestations that the line-up had been accidental. I had secretly suspected that Merry really wanted to go out and find the most Politically Correct band she could possibly put together.

"Yeah, but not even as a political statement like that," Merry blithely contradicted. "I wanted it set up so that we could split everything equally four ways. So that it would always be perfectly balanced, a perfect democracy, everyone contributing equally. We all agreed to start the band with egalitarian, feminist ideals, so that no one viewpoint... and no one person... could ever dominate, either musically or personally."

"So you'd never have to deal with an Elisha situation ever again," I teased.

"Precisely," said Merry to my lapel, drifting off even as the taxi pulled up outside our building.

"Don't fall asleep. Am I going to have to carry you in?" I teased as I paid the driver.

"You couldn't even lift me," Merry laughed.

"I bet I could," I insisted, and then I did it, just to prove her wrong. I put one arm under her shoulders and one under her knees, and I picked her up and carried her, staggering slightly, to the freight elevator. "Shall I carry you over the doorstep?"

"That does _not_ mean we're getting married."

"Just getting my practice in, for when you finally give in." I put her back down, wobbling slightly, right way up on her feet again. She cuffed me gently on the top of my head, before pulling me into the flat and into bed.

 

\----------

 

After a week and a half, Cindy had done her job, and Merry's new, as yet unnamed band had signed with the painfully hip and arty dance-oriented rock label, POW-MIA. I knew POW-MIA only by reputation, but its founder James had also interned at Windlass before starting his own band, only a year before I had been there. Even though his disco-punk outfit had quickly broken up, POW-MIA had taken on a life of its own, mining the New York club scene for odd, uncompromising acts that didn't fit easily either in the rock world or the dance world.

"God, it is such a relief, talking to James, after all the bullshit at Windlass," Merry confessed, then immediately looked guilty. "Sorry, I don't mean you, obviously, Danny. But you remember what it was like after you left."

"I don't, and I'm sorry," I shrugged, a twinge of guilt marring my faint pride that, actually, I had been really fucking good at my A&R job. Maybe even better than Bebe Newcolm, if Merry was to be believed.

"You know what they were like, promise you the earth, then screw you quietly behind your own back and say ' _oh, it's for your own good! That's just what the test pressings came back with!'_ James has gone through that whole bullshit himself, he's been in a band, he seems to understand that when an artist says complete artistic control, they mean complete. He told me, specifically, that it didn't matter to him how many records we sold, what mattered to him was that we could make the best damn record we possibly could."

I secretly thought that maybe there was actually no such thing as Complete Artistic Control, but I kept my mouth shut, as Merry looked so genuinely happy with the deal.

To record their album, James sent Merry's gang off to Berlin, insisting that the American ex-Pat community that had sprung up there in the wake of W's election would be the perfect seedbed for Merry's international, interracial, poly-sexual mob. I was disappointed to see her go, but then again, I did have to go back into the studio to mix my own band's record. So the first week of August, I kissed my girlfriend goodbye again, and the pair of us retreated back to our respective studios to work. This two-band relationship thing, it might actually work, so long as both of us were busy in bands.

Among the Metropolis lads, the joke stuck, and by the time Doyle and I got back to Catskills Mansions, we were already calling the album Mountaineering. Two weeks later, Dieter broke his ankle on the ascent of Mont Blanc, had to be airlifted out, and was flown back to New York with his foot in a cast, limping on a cane that he still managed to somehow pass off as a fashionable affectation, rather than something he needed to get around. Being injured had not affected his passion for mountains in the slightest, in fact if anything, it had renewed his ambition to return the next summer and finish the ascent, surrounding himself with books on mountains and mountain climbers and failed expeditions to Everest to sustain the obsession, even while he was earthbound.

With Dieter back in the studio, being tended to by Cindy, the album mixes took on a harder, shiny, almost brittle tone that oddly suited the angry, jaded songs. It was slick, yes, as all of Barry's production efforts invariably were, and sounded listener friendly and radio ready. But what a weird album MVC were getting, underneath that radio sheen. Beyond the singles - and MVC had already tipped _Menage_ , earmarking it for heavy promotion - it was a strange, dark, and decidedly uncommercial album. I admired it, like a weird glassy monolith, inaccessible and forbidding, and I was proud of it, but I did not love it.

But when I emailed MP3s of the rough mixes to Merry, she absolutely adored it. "This is the best thing you've ever done," she insisted down the phone from the band's new apartment in Berlin. "It's odd how it's so heavily produced, but it's still the first album you've ever recorded that actually captures, what it feels like to be down the front at a Metropolis gig."

"Oh god, that bad," I quipped.

"No, not bad, just... _intense_. I don't think you know, just how emotionally intense you lot come across live. It's a very powerful and moving experience, watching you perform, but it is also just ever so slightly unsettling. Don't get me wrong; I love the first two albums. And not just because they remind me so much of you. But they are kind of sweet, underneath all the swagger. And this one is not sweet, it's got teeth."

Teeth. That was a good way of putting it. The band still had our swagger, but we sounded tougher, meaner, more elemental. Mountaineering was turning out to be a good totem for the band, and Dieter, instead of being upset that we were taking the piss out of him, actually threw himself wholeheartedly into designing artwork and stage sets and photo shoots. He'd decided to leave the 1920s theme, and built the album artwork around creepy taxidermy of birds from tiny local museums around the world. For the cover, he chose a striking photo of scarlet tanager fighting off two tufted titmice in a simulated aerial battle against a painted sky. I did not want to even ask what that was supposed to symbolise, and MVC made muttering noises about the artwork, as they had clearly wanted a picture of their photogenic group on the cover. But Dieter was insistent, he did not even want a photo of the group anywhere in the artwork.

For our promotional photo shoots, Dieter dictated our style choices and did everything short of choosing our clothes and haircuts. But even after Dick reappeared from Texas, his 50s swing clothes swapped for '19th Century Cattle Baron', it was obvious that the whole band's aesthetic was changing, but was moving in the same direction. I refused to wear anything but a suit, but I swapped my waistcoat for a suitably alpine looking knit vest and trimmed my rough studio beard to a pair of immense Victorian sideburns, mostly because Merry had told me she'd always fancied me in my mod phase. Dieter had thrown himself whole-heartedly into his 'Edwardian Mountain Climber' look in his tweeds and Jaegger wools, trimming his beard but cultivating his moustache into fanciful handlebars with styling wax. Only Doyle refused to play along, turning up to the photo shoot in plain black jeans and a plain black t-shirt, over which the shoot's stylist insisted on throwing a military style jacket with epaulettes, just so that he looked like he was in the same band. He had given a proper college try at growing a beard, but his blond facial hair came in completely patchy, tufted on his chin like a billy goat, though refusing to grow around his mouth or up his jawline.

With Dick in town, we went into meetings, first with Taylor, then with MVC, then with a battalion of PRs and booking agents and radio pluggers and other assorted consultants. Faced with this enormous assortment of people, I found it hard to believe that Metropolis had ever really put out our first album just between myself and Gerry. Had I really just posted out videotapes of our first single's video, and hoped for the best? Now we had hired a whole team of people to make sure our songs were played on the right radio stations and music video channels around the world. And had I really booked the Impediment tour with just that binder in Andre's office? We had three booking agents now, one for the Americas, one of the UK and Europe, and another for Asia and Australia. And even though I'd assumed Emma and Sandra would carry on doing our press, MVC had said no, and we now had an entire PR firm with offices in New York, London and Tokyo.

That was the first, awkward sign that bigger might not be better for Metropolis, as I personally called Sandra and apologised to her, saying the decision had been taken out of my hands. She was nice about it, and said that really, she had her hands full working Merry's band, but it still felt weird. I had liked working with Emma, had trusted Emma, and liked having Sandra around on promotional days just to make sure everything went smoothly - which it never did, but Sandra had a way of surfing the chaos and making everything seem like it was supposed to have gone like that. But now there were strangers working on Mountaineering, and people I didn't know - though they all seemed _far_ too professional to ever put up with the chaos our early press days had been - sweeping me efficiently into interviews with the Guardian or Rolling Stone.

But just as the group of people working on Metropolis had grown larger, so had the concerns and demands and scheduling conflicts of the group of four men grown exponentially more complicated.

"Clara is pregnant," announced Dick proudly, and I turned to him with a shocked expression I had to quickly cover with congratulations to keep my emotions from appearing completely transparent on my face. Why was it that Dick got the wife and the baby, when Merry and I had been trying so hard, for so long, to no avail? "I need to take off the last month or two of her pregnancy, because there's no way she can manage the ranch in that state, even with our foreman, and I want at least one month, preferably two months paternity leave once our kid is born."

"Three months," I sputtered. "You can't just take three months out of the middle of a world tour!"

"Well, then you'll just have to find yourself a new drummer because I can't take the first months out of my child's life." Dick folded his arms across his chest stubbornly. He was very tanned, and his arms looked even more muscular from the physical work on the farm, so that I felt like a pale, pasty child beside him.

"Wait, wait, when is she due?" Taylor asked diplomatically.

"January, but it could be two weeks either way."

"Well, that's fine. We never tour in December anyway, you guys always take a month off over Hanukkah and Christmas. Late January and February we had you pencilled in to tour Mexico and South America, but it's fine, we'll reschedule for June 2002, the weeks before Glastonbury - you guys are headlining the NME stage, OK? You can treat Mexico as warm-up gigs."

"Can't do next June," Dieter interrupted. "I've signed up for a team who are planning an ascent of the Eiger the first two weeks of June."

"Babies, mountains... is there anything else that you lot seem to find more important than Metropolis these days?" I sneered sarcastically.

"Daniel," warned Taylor. "It's OK, we'll reschedule for the first two weeks of August, just before Reading/Leeds."

I was about to protest that Merry and I had scheduled a two-week coastal walking holiday in Wales for early August, to make up for the long-delayed trip we'd lost to the Curse tour. But if it came down to it, really, if that was the only time the band could hit the lucrative and still-expanding South American markets, then our holiday would have to be rescheduled yet again. Merry would understand; she always did.

"No good," Dick complained. "Grand cattle drive to get my new stock back from market, the yearling sales, need to check out good blood stock for my heritage breeds. Absolutely no way I can be away from the ranch. That's why I was delayed in joining you gentlemen at this meeting, this year."

"Are you a drummer or are you an artisanal cattle farmer?" I scoffed.

"Well," Dick mused, stroking his stubbled chin. "That's a good question."

"Mountain climbing. Artisanal cattle ranching. Come on, Doyle, it's time for you to open a salmon farm and buy a yacht and sail round the world so we can be saddled with every rock star in decline cliché there is going."

"Hey, it's not as if I'm the only one," Dick protested. "I'm going into business with Fab and Jules from The Stakes to open a heritage beef bar restaurant in Prospect Heights. Artisanal food is the new rock'n'roll, at least according to the Village Voice."

"Heritage beef bar," I repeated, barely believing what he was saying.

"You're all welcome to the grand opening," Dick shrugged.

"I'm vegetarian," I said coldly, crossing out another month on the planner calendar in front of me. For fucks sake, why was it my bandmates were happy to blithely go off and climb mountains and attend cattle sales, when I had to repeatedly drop everything, including my relationship, and run off to go wherever the band needed, whenever I was required? "So we are all still flying to Switzerland in two weeks to film our video, aren't we, or does someone have an international cock-farm that requires their urgent attention?"

"Sorry, guys, can't make it, I'm swimming for Portugal in the Olympics next month," Doyle drawled.

I shot him daggers, even as the others chuckled. "The Olympics were _last_ year, Doyle? Right. Tour rehearsals next week, then we'll regroup in Chamonix in two weeks. Have you confirmed Dieter's changes with the director, Taylor?"

"Yup, we're all good," Taylor assured me. The whole video treatment for _Menage A Trois_ had also been Dieter's idea, inspired by a group of mountain climbers who had been trapped, snowed in, in a tiny cabin over the winter. The director had located a suitable location and an ancient shack which was to be subjected to storms, drifts, being crushed under ice, flooded, and finally burned to the ground, while Metropolis played inside. It felt like an apt metaphor for what had been happening to Metropolis the past year, I reflected, and the whole band had unanimously agreed to it. The band never agreed to anything unanimously ever, so I took that as a sign.


	41. Your City Lies In Dust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On a bright Tuesday morning in September 2001, Daniel J. Asheton boards a plane at Newark and flies straight into History.
> 
> OK, it's not a spoiler to say that he survives 9/11. But upon landing in Europe, the tragedy provokes a series of events that cause him to come so close to everything he has always wanted in life... only to have everything he cares about completely fall apart.
> 
> Content warning: I'm not going to give specific content warning because that would spoil a major plot point, and I want the full emotional context of what has happened to hit the reader in the chest. It is *supposed* to be devastating. But it's probably best to prepare yourself emotionally for some heavy shit.
> 
> Oh! Also, although in the course of this novel, I have borrowed freely from many existent bands I've known, in both NYC and London, The Racists was originally the actual name of [Citizen Helene's](http://citizenhelene.bandcamp.com/album/citizen-helene) backing group. The members of the Berlin Racists are in no way even slightly related to the London Racists. But that said, the London Racists were awesome. Buy the record, especially the heartbreaking (f)anthem 'Stephen Fry'!

Metropolis spent the first week of September in tour rehearsals. Then endless meetings with MVC and pluggers and booking agents seemed to spill over into the early part of the next week, so I let the other band members fly to Geneva ahead of me, and rescheduled my flight for the following Tuesday. It was annoying that I had to go into MVC meetings on my own while the rest of my band larked about in Europe, but then again the meetings were a lot easier without comments from the peanut gallery. Once I'd approved the last set of radio ads, I threw a suit and a few changes of shirt into a suitcase, and scheduled an MVC company car to Newark Airport for early the next morning. At last, the perks of being on a major label were starting to show.

It was a crisp, clear, mild autumnal morning, and I had good luck with transport. The cab was actually early, and we managed to sneak through the Holland Tunnel before the traffic struck. I checked my suitcase and my guitar then walked through into the departure lounge, just standing and staring across the harbour at the New York skyline, watching the early morning sun staining the World Trade Centre a beautiful golden-pink colour. For a few minutes, I stood there, reflecting on how lucky I was to live in such a beautiful city, before boarding for my flight was finally called. _Lights, Camera, Action_ , I thought to myself and settled into my recliner seat, grateful for having been bumped up to business class with the frequent flyer points I had accrued on the last tour.

About halfway through the flight, it became obvious that something was up. First, all of the flight attendants disappeared into the cockpit, and were fluttering with nerves when they emerged, talking in low voices between themselves as they gathered in twos and threes. Then they launched an unscheduled drinks trolley, and though I was not actually in the mood for the complimentary glass of wine they tried to force on me, I could see that the flight attendants were spooked, and were actually going through the plane row by row, as if searching for something or someone.

Then the in-flight entertainment went out, and a collective groan went up from the passengers, as various call lights flickered on and off across the cabin. I gave up even pretending to read my book, and craned my head around the plane, trying to work out what was going on. The captain came on, over the loudspeakers, clearly trying to sound calm and in control, but his voice was raw with barely contained emotion.

"Sorry for the inconvenience folks, but we've had a message from flight control. This plane is being diverted. We will be making an unscheduled stop at Rennes."

The cabin erupted into whispers and the murmur of frightened passengers, as I tried to attract the attention of someone, anyone, one of the flight attendants, one of the other passengers. "What's going on? Is there a problem with the plane? Why are we being diverted to Brittany?"

"There's nothing wrong with this plane," a flight attended told the entire section. "All planes are being grounded."

"All planes? Why? What's happened?" I felt the panic rising in my mind.

A shocked looking woman appeared at the curtain that separated Business Class from the walkway to the pilot's deck. "I've just heard the captain on the radio to flight control in New York. Someone's just flown a plane into the World Trade Center..."

The plane erupted in chaos, as the news travelled down the rows and jumped the passage into the economy cabin. I felt sick. A plane hitting the World Trade Center? I could see the WTC from my bedroom window. What was it, an accident? Some inexperienced pilot blown off course from Laguardia?

One of the flight attendants got on the overhead loudspeakers and tried to calm the passengers. "Please, ladies and gentlemen, I need you to remain calm, and return to your seats. The captain has turned on the fasten your seatbelts sign, so I need you to all go back to your seats, and remain belted in until he turns off the sign."

"Are you going to tell us what's happening?" demanded a stroppy woman in the row ahead of me. "What did that woman say about a plane hitting the World Trade Center?"

The flight attendant ignored her, disappearing behind the curtain, back up to the flight deck, as I felt the panic drowning me. If it was an accident, surely someone would tell us what was going on?

Wait, no, there was another announcement coming over the loudspeakers from the captain again. "I'm sorry, folks, but it looks like Rennes airport is full up. We're being diverted to Schiphol, where they say they have a gate for us. Now I can't tell you how long we'll be held at Schiphol, but I'll pass on more information as we have it."

Gripping the armrests of my chair, I was suddenly very glad of the remains of my glass of lukewarm Chablis. Schiphol? Where was that, Amsterdam? That was hundreds of miles from Chamonix. How on earth was I ever going to make it to the video shoot now?

But people in the cabin would not shut up about that plane going into the World Trade Center, until finally the captain came back on the overhead. "People, I need you to sit down, and remain calm. The information that I have is this: About half an hour ago, a plane hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. We believed this was an accident, until this news came in. Another plane has hit the other tower, and now a third has crashed into the Pentagon. All planes are being grounded, repeat, all planes everywhere in the world are being grounded. The United States is under attack..." I didn't even hear the rest of the announcement, as the panic in the cabin reached a deafening roar.

The story emerged in bits and pieces, every minute of the next hour lasting an age, as the plane hurtled its way towards Amsterdam. Planes had hit the World Trade Center, planes deliberately hijacked and piloted into buildings like massive bombs. First one tower had collapsed, and then the other. It was unthinkable! Those two massive skyscrapers, iconic aspects of the New York skyline, as solid as mountains. How could they just... fall? I could not imagine my city - the city I'd called home since I was 9 - without them, like a face with two front teeth knocked out. The mind just recoiled from the loss. The whole world seemed suddenly reduced down to the cabin of our one diverted plane, as fragile as a dust mote in a sunbeam. The fear was everywhere, so tangible it felt like we could choke on it. New York was in chaos, flights all over the world were cancelled and being grounded one after another.

Everyone was turfed off the plane at Schiphol; there was no question of the flight going on to Geneva now. I stumbled about, trying to find a phone, trying to find a computer terminal, or anything. I waited in a queue about six people deep for an internet connection, then fired off a set of desperate emails. I emailed my parents first: _I'm alive, I'm fine, I'm in Amsterdam. Love you - Daniel._ Then I emailed Merry: _Where are you, my love? Please tell me you're still in Berlin and safe. I was on a plane when it happened, but we've been grounded in Amsterdam. Stranded here, but it looks like we were one of the planes to get out of the States when it happened. Love you, but please let me know you're still in Berlin and OK. Daw you - Danny._ Then I emailed Taylor: _You guys are going to have to shoot the video without me. I am stranded in Amsterdam and no idea when anything is flying again. Send my regards and apologies to the band._

When I had finished typing the third email, there was already a response from Merry: _Oh my god, Danny, I was so afraid you were dead. Two planes from Newark are missing, I was so terrified you were on one of them. Just get on the next train or bus or rental car to Berlin. I don't care how you get here, but please, just get here now. I need to see you. I daw you. M_

_I'll be there soon. Love you - Danny._

Bypassing the long queues at the airline counters, full of angry customers wanting to know when they could fly on to their proper destinations, I walked to the rail office, and got in the thankfully shorter line. "I need to get to Berlin," I told the woman at the ticket counter when I finally got there, then suddenly cursed my American arrogance, repeating myself in German and regretting my lack of Dutch.

But the woman laughed. "I understand your English, just fine, sir. Berlin... let me see... there's not much left, but... OK, wait. I can get you the last seat on a train leaving Amsterdam in two hours, but you are going to have to get the tram into the centre of town very quickly."

"Fine, I'll take it," I told her, clutching the precious ticket as I walked away.

I cleared immigration and got my passport stamped - relieved, for the first time, at the EU seal on my British passport - and went to the luggage collection area, only to find that nothing was being unloaded off any planes. Everything had to be searched, and double-checked, and the man at the counter didn't even know if planes that had been diverted were going to discharge their luggage in Schiphol, or wait and take it on to their original destinations. Throwing up my hands, I decided to abandon both my luggage, and the guitar I'd been playing since I was 17. Merry was more important than both.

I still couldn't quite get my head around what had happened, even once I had cleared Amsterdam and was sitting on a genuine Trans Europe Express bound for Berlin. All around me, on the front pages of newspapers, were terrible, terrifying pictures of planes striking buildings, with headlines in languages I could not read, but I felt sick and dizzy every time I even tried to think about it. New York under attack, and I couldn't decide if it was terrible or a relief that I wasn't there. I had lost my book somewhere in the shuffle, and had only my over the shoulder carry-on bag, containing a few toiletries, a change of underpants, the treatment for the video I would now never shoot. A television off somewhere down the train kept showing explosions on a loop, but I couldn't bear to watch, so I found myself staring out the window for six and a half hours, too sick and nervous to even eat.

Exhausted with jet lag, bedragged from lack of sleep or washing, I dragged myself from the train, and realised I could not even remember the address of the flat where Merry and the band were staying. I would have to find another internet cafe, fire off another email, look it up on the internet somehow.

And yet, impossibly, unbelievably, Merry was standing waiting for me on the other side of the ticket barrier. Running towards me, she grabbed me, throwing her arms around my neck, and holding onto me for dear life, burying her face in my hair. "I love you, I love you, I love you," she kept saying, almost like a mantra. "I am so glad to see you alive, you have no idea."

"What... how... have you been waiting here this entire time?" I stuttered, putting my arms around her waist and squeezing, hard.

"All the trains from Amsterdam come in at the same station. I came down first thing, and just waited. I knew you'd be here eventually."

"Well, I'm here, I'm here," I told her, smoothing down her unkempt, spikey hair and kissing her tenderly.

"Where's your luggage?" she asked, suddenly looking around.

"Gone."

"What?"

"Left it. Doesn't matter, it'll turn up eventually, either in Geneva, or I might contact the airline and ask them to just send it right back to New York. I suppose I can always buy another guitar..."

"You came here without your luggage, and without your _guitar_?" Merry seemed astonished.

I shrugged lightly. "You sounded so upset in your email. And I _needed_ to see you, to remind myself..." My words trailed off, as I pushed her spiky bangs back from her forehead, gazing into her eyes. "The world ends, and you're the only person I want to see."

Merry drew back and just looked at me. "Marry me," she said, so quietly I almost missed it.

"Wait, aren't I supposed to ask you that?" I heard my voice say, trying to cover my shock with humour. Was she really serious, was she really going to do it this time?

"I don't give a shit about convention. Just marry me, OK?"

"What, is this all it takes? A little international crisis and a fleet of downed planes, 10,000 people dead? When all along, I've just been trying to get you pregnant?"

Merry's face crumpled, and she looked as if she were about to cry, and I realised that the joke was far too soon. "OK, OK, no no no, I'm sorry. That was inappropriate. Let's get married." I took her hands again, and squeezed them, then kissed them softly. "I should really buy you a ring, huh?"

"It doesn't matter, I don't mind," she told me, turning and leading me by the hand, back towards a busy taxi rank. "I just want to be with you."

We bought rings the next day, in the diamond district of Berlin. Nothing seemed real to me, jet lagged out of my mind and emotionally drained, but it was better than staying in the flat with those terrible videos of death and destruction playing over and over on the television. I had been shocked by the film that the news had been playing over and over, with an added layer of surprise on top of shock, as I realised that I recognised the vantage point from which it had been shot. I knew that stairway and that massive angel in the corner of the screen. It was filmed on Will Zarnetski's balcony. And there was Will, being interviewed, shellshocked, as the man who had shot the most famous amateur film sequence since the Zapruder film.

"I was just testing my new camera," Will had explained from across the Atlantic, with German subtitles beneath. "My partner was joking around about me becoming the new Andy Warhol, but we can't see the Empire State Building from my apartment. So I just set it up on the balcony, pointing towards the World Trade Centre, and set the timer for eight hours. We caught the whole thing, the planes hitting, the collapse, the shockwave."

Merry had to drag me out of the apartment, or I would have just sat there, watching the film over and over, compulsively, even though the sight of the thing made me feel physically ill. But having a marriage to plan, that gave me something to focus on, something to do, even as US airspace stayed sealed, and I felt like I had no way home. It didn't matter; my home was with Merry.

Well, my home may have been with Merry, but I have to be honest. I felt kinda awkward, and out of place staying in her band's flat. With Deltawave, no matter how awful or bratty Elisha was being, I had always felt like I belonged, first as their A&R, and later, even just as Merry's boy-thing. But this new band... I dunno. I never really felt like they gave me a chance. For a start, it was a shock to me, just how casually Anti-American Dolores and JohnRoger could be as we all gathered to watch the news and comment on it. True, it wasn't as if I was really American, not properly at least. But the way that Dolores and JohnRoger talked, about how the US had 'brought 9/11 on themselves', through their irresponsible foreign policy, bringing up obscure accusations from Asian or Caribbean politics that I had never even heard before... I'll be honest; that shocked me. I knew they didn't mean it personally, when Dolores would talk about 'ignorant Americans' but then again, the way she rolled her eyes when I would try to counter some wild claim of hers - like, I dunno, something totally nuts, like, the CIA's collusion with the assassination of the Chilean president or whatever - it was hard not to feel slightly wounded.

And the gay thing. OK, you know, I tried to be open-minded. I had nothing against lesbians, I swear to god. In fact, when Doyle emailed me, upon hearing that I was staying in a Berlin apartment with a lesbian couple, to make insalubrious suggestions, I emailed him back sharpish, telling him how unacceptable that was. I liked JohnRoger, we got along fine when we weren't talking politics, and I did my best to remember their pronouns. But then Dolores and Cindy would get into one of their arguments - and they weren't even proper arguments, because they didn't even disagree, really - they were just rants. There would just be this fucking tirade of 'men this' and 'straight people that' and 'fuck cis people' and it made me, as a straight man, feel very, very uncomfortable. There was only so much of being told that I was personally responsible for the problems of the world that I could take in one day. In theory, I was totally in favour of Feminism and equality of the sexes, the way that Merry had always explained it to me. But Dolores, she didn't seem like she wanted equality of the sexes, she wanted Straight White Men to grovel. And seeing as I was the only one of those around in that apartment, it was not exactly a fair fight.

Merry played peacemaker, at first. And boy was that a reversal from the Deltawave days when I'd pulled Merry and her feuding bandmate from each other's throats. But mostly, she just tried to distract me, not really taking sides, even when Dolores or Cindy was having a proper go, but just changing the conversation to something less incendiary. And mostly what she distracted me with was our wedding. It just seemed so incredible to me that it was finally going to happen, that I threw myself into planning it with all the control freak zeal I'd been denied in the studio.

First I rang the German equivalent of a Citizen's Advice Bureau, asking how one went about getting married in Germany, asking the woman to repeat herself over and over as I realised how rusty my high school German was. It might work with MTV interviewers who did their best to flatter me and my halting pronunciation, but this was another world. Eventually, I figured out that Merry and I needed to go to an office called a Standesamt and lodge our intention to get married, but we would need a passport or birth certificate.

Merry looked up this Standesamt in the yellow pages, and found one nearby, so we made an appointment, collected our passports and obediently trotted down to register our intention of spending the rest of our lives together. This registrar, luckily, found someone who spoke English and explained to us, no, that it wasn't passport _or_ birth certificate, it was passport _and_ birth certificate, and both of us would have to pass blood tests of some kind.

"OK, I guess I can email my parents to get a copy of my birth certificate when we get home, but where can we get blood tests?" I wondered. "And can we still register in the meantime, so we don't lose our place in the line..."

"Line?" asked the registrar, confused. "But we do not perform the ceremony immediately! You have to apply, and then there is the waiting period..."

"Waiting period?" I asked. "How long is the waiting period?"

The registrar took Merry's and my passports and peered at them. "You are both British nationals?"

"I have dual citizenship," I insisted, and the woman brightened. "British and American."

The woman shook her head grumpily. "No, this is no good. You will have to contact your embassy for an affidavit of Ehefähigkeitszeugnis, and then there is a 6-week waiting period."

"Ehaffa-what?" I wailed. "Six weeks?"

"You will have the rest of your lives to be married, what difference does six weeks make," the woman reminded me testily.

"In six weeks, the flying ban will be lifted. We could both be anywhere..."

The woman folded our passports, and handed them back. "You two are British, go to Britain. No affidavit and no waiting period required."

Merry and I exchanged meaningful glances as we walked back to her apartment. "She's right, we could to go England..." Merry ventured.

"How? There are no flights."

"Eurostar?"

I felt my heart leap as she suggested it. To be alone with Merry, properly alone, without her bandmates to tell me how Straight White Men were personally responsible for everything from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the collapse of the Twin Towers? I had to pretend not to be as keen as I really was. "But your band... don't you have recording to do..."

"We finished the single already. It's supposed to be coming out soon, and Sandra will want us to do press, I guess, but until then...?" Her voice actually sounded hopeful as she squeezed my hand.

"Let's go to England."

Another set of massive train journeys, first from Berlin to Paris, and then from Paris to London by Eurostar, holding hands, wearing our rings just for the thrill of it. We found a hotel in the West End, and I went down to the registrar's office in Marylebone to buy a licence as Merry looked for a short-term rental flat. It turned out that Britain, too, required a residency period, but it was only two weeks, so we decided to buy the licence and wait.

I had wanted to stay in Hampstead, for some kind of symmetry, close to the Royal Free Hospital where I'd been born, and the elegant stone house where I'd grown up. But it turned out we could not actually afford Hampstead, so we revised our search down the road somewhat to Swiss Cottage, or "South Hampstead" as our estate agent rather euphemistically had it. It was fine, in fact, I already pretty much knew the neighbourhood from that month I'd spent in Chalk Farm at my cousin's house. Really, I should have called my cousin and invited her to the wedding, should have emailed Sandra in Stoke Newington, gathered up the few friends and relatives I had in London, but I couldn't stand the idea of sharing Merry with anyone else. Not when I finally had her to myself.

The flat was a pokey little studio at the top of a long, tall Victorian terrace, all pointy gables and elaborate brick fronts, but it felt like heaven to me. Merry and I were going to do this, we were going to get married. I went to Marks and Sparks and bought new underwear and shirts, then on a whim went to Saville Row for a fitting on a hand tailored suit to be married in. Merry didn't even have a dress, but we went to Camden Market and she bought a second hand ballgown she said she'd alter to make shorter and more appropriate. 

And although we knew we were not going to be staying long, we found ourselves starting to nest in the tiny bedsit. I bought beautiful silver-grey plates at Habitat, so we didn't have to eat our Indian takeaways straight out of the containers. Forever after, I would always associate the smell of sag paneer and chilli naan with that flat, because we lived on Indian takeaway in London like we had lived on Chinese takeaway in New York. Waitrose and the curry house on the corner and the local off license were the only places we ever bothered leaving the flat to frequent. OK, and maybe a couple of late night strolls down to Primrose Hill to watch the moon rise over London, nestled against one another on a park bench, feeling like characters in a Slur song. But I was no longer a '20th Century Boy', I was a 21st Century Boy, and the 21st Century now felt strange and hostile, so we hid away in our cosy flat as much as we could.

Communication with the outside world, however, was a problem. There was no phone or internet in the flat, and no time to get any installed, so we were reliant on either going to the web cafe at the end of the street, or asking our landlady for permission to take a call - and that only covered incoming calls. Outgoing calls had to be made from the phone box on the corner.

POW-MIA kept trying to get hold of Merry, but it was almost impossible to arrange transatlantic calls. Something was going on with Merry's single, but it was difficult to establish exactly what. Until one day, I walked past a newsagent and saw a small photo of Merry in the corner of the NME's cover, with the words BANNED IN THE USA slapped across her mouth. Panicking, I bought the paper, but the article was long on rumour and short on fact.

"The new single by Merry and the Racists - hang on, what kind of a band name is The Racists?" I demanded, looking up at her in our tiny kitchen. Since she had started her new band, there seemed to be so many aspects of her life that I knew absolutely nothing about any more, and that bothered me, perhaps even more than the stupid name.

"It was Gabe's idea. It started as a joke, but they all loved it - Gabe, Dolores, JohnRoger and even Cindy, they howled with laughter and thought it was hilarious. I said I didn't know if it was a good idea, but I was outvoted. I've just got used to it. I guess it's kind of funny, really, considering."

"It's a terrible name," I insisted, feeling my irritation rising and rising, though I couldn't quite put my finger on why. "And in such poor taste, considering you're the only white person in your band..."

"It's a better name than fucking Deltawave," Merry shot back. "What does the article say? Sandra didn't say we were due to have a piece in the NME. And I haven't been able to get an email back off James to say when he'll call."

"The new single by Merry and the Racists, _Emotional Terrorist_ , has been banned in the USA in the wake of the recent attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pent..."

" _What_?" exploded Merry. " _Emotional Terrorist_ was supposed to be the B-side. The single was supposed to be _Rock Your Body Tonight_. What the fuck has happened... Did James just screw us over? Oh christ..." Her face went as white as a sheet.

"In the wake of 9/11, a single written from the point of view of a terrorist, and containing choice lines like 'There's a bomb in the city so you can't go today' and 'I killed you, we killed you, we all watched you die' might seem a little too far over the line between social commentary and pure offensive scandal-mongering, but obviously a band called The Racists are not shy about courting negative publicity..."

"Oh my god, that's not even the line..." Merry gasped, her hands over her mouth. "It's not city, it's _clinic_."

"...Several left-wing politicians in the UK have stepped forward to defend the single, saying that it shows remarkable sensitivity in depicting the moral dilemmas facing desperate people contemplating desperate measures in the face of US oppression... the song will be played tonight on BBC Radio 1, followed by a debate on Question Time about the ethics of art, and the responsibility of artists with regards to expressing both sides of atrocities..."

"Oh my god, they think... oh fuck!" Merry's eyes were desperate. "Not only is that not what the fuck it's about but... oh fuck, for real? He switched the single? I hate this! This is the same stupid fucking screw-the-artist shit that is the reason that I left Windlass, this is the same stupid shit that broke up Deltawave. Switching the singles on us, without telling anyone... what kind of fucking major label... Honestly, Danny, what is the point of moving from a Major Label that explicitly tells you they're going to screw you over any way they can, to moving to an Indie Label who promise you the earth in terms of artistic integrity and complete control, and then screw you over anyway?"

"Look, Merry, James has terrible fucking timing, yes, but I really don't think he is actually _trying_ to screw you over," I started to say, still smarting from the comment about Windlass. I had worked my butt off at Windlass, trying to protect her from the worst of it; it was Elisha who had destroyed that working relationship.

But at that moment, there was a knock on the door. "Phone for you, Miriam," bellowed our landlady from down below. "From the States, it sounds important."

Merry was almost in tears. "Look, it's on my fucking laptop. Play it, tell me if you think it's about terrorism..."

As Merry went down to talk to her record company, I walked over to Merry's laptop, brought up the media player, and hit play. It was, to be honest, an absolute beast of a song, with a sinuous funk bass wrapped around chattering electronics and perfectly taut drums. Regardless of the title or subject matter, my inner A&R man thought it was an excellent single to be leading with, sharp, distinctive and catchy as hell. I'd always known, all along, that Merry's songs were miles better than Elisha's had been, and here was the proof.

But there was the vocal kicking in. The words were hard to make out, buried beneath layers of reverb and distortion, but the narrator was clearly in a terrible state. In the first verse, she was contemplating doing something awful, attempting to choose between impossible options. In the second verse, she had resolved to do the lesser of two evils, but there was that weird _bomb in the city/clinic_ line that didn't really make sense. I rewound it, and caught the second half of the couplet. _There's a bomb in the clinic / so you can't go today / someone's put a bomb in the clinic / but I'm the one that's going to hell?_ It was definitely a question, Merry's voice cleverly rising with the melody. And then, that intensely morally ambiguous last verse, where she sang about a holocaust, and sung about death, and that last repeated couplet, _I've killed you, we've killed you, we all watched you die, I killed you, we killed you, give us back both our lives._ It was a blunt, harrowing, emotional bombshell of a song but it was nowhere near as offensive, or as glorifying of terrorism as the NME article suggested it might be.

I double clicked the icon, and played it again, but halfway through, listening to Merry's words, as she was clearly saying _clinic_ now, despite the reverb, it suddenly struck me. This song was not about terrorism at all. Whatever was happening in the song, it was happening on a domestic scale, in bathrooms and on examining tables, and in a clinic, a clinic with a bomb threat... My breath suddenly caught in the back of my throat.

After about 20 minutes, Merry reappeared at the top of the stairs, her face shellshocked as she walked into the kitchen to put the kettle one. When she emerged, carrying a cup of tea for each of us, she sat down on the sofa, but she only stared at her tea as if unable to drink it, hands still over her mouth, her eyes moist as if she were holding back tears.

"What's happening?" I asked, though really, all I really wanted to say was, _what is this song about, what the hell is this song about_?

"James has just about managed to withdraw the single from sale in the States, mainly because no one wants to stock it in the wake of 9/11. Oh my god, Danny, for the rest of my fucking life, I am going to be known as the girl that released a song called _Emotional Terrorist_ , a week after 9/11."

"Fuck," I swore, and I fought conflicting urges to go over and wrap my arm around the back of her neck for comfort, and to grill her about those damned lyrics. "But that's the US, it's clearly out already in the UK."

Merry nodded slowly. "James won't withdraw it here. Sandra says it's already got so much publicity, that there's so much controversy around it that it's selling really well, and might be on the charts at midweek - if the UK doesn't ban it, too? There's a lot of anti-US sentiment in Europe, a lot of people who think that the US deserved something... _like_ 9/11, even if they don't come out and put it in those terms. And my song is a fucking rallying cry for them. Fuck, this is the last thing I ever wanted from this song... I didn't even want to release it, but..."

"But that monster bassline," my inner A&R replied. "It's an incredible track, and an obvious single." I paused before going on, trying to collect myself. "But Merry, the lyrics...?"

"Yup," she said quietly, as if she knew what was coming next.

"The song is not really about terrorism, is it?"

"Nope," she agreed. "But the only thing that would go over even worse in the US, than a song about terrorism 6 days after 9/11, would be a bouncy pop song about... well, about abortion. About trying to get an abortion, but the day you're scheduled for your procedure, some right-wing nutcase rings in a bomb threat to the clinic, so you spend the afternoon bleeding in a parking lot on Brixton Hill."

"When?" I demanded, almost shaking with rage, and betrayal and with... grief? How could she be so calm about this? Weren't women who had abortions supposed to be quivering, emotional wrecks? She seemed completely unrepentant, even matter-of fact. "When did you do it?"

"It was just after I flew back to England. I was so sick on the plane over, and I just couldn't shake it, vomiting all over the place, so Gabe's girlfriend made me go to her doctor. It took ten minutes for them to hear my symptoms, give me a urine test, and come back saying pregnant, pregnant, _pregnant_..."

I just stared at her, feeling shock spreading through every part of my body, even my finger and toes feeling shocked and numb and unable to process what had happened. She aborted my child, was all I could think. She betrayed me, she betrayed _us_. "How?"

"I was nearly three months along. So it must have been that weekend in Texas. Dick and Clara's wedding. How fucking foolish we were..." She didn't even sound upset, not like I felt upset and torn apart and turned upside down, my internal organs scooped out and replaced with something hollow and dead and utterly betrayed. She just sounded kind of resigned.

"So that business with the bookshelves, and you crying and emotional all the time... and your cravings for that fucking Chinese soup," I suddenly remembered. Christ, my girlfriend hadn't been insane, she had just been pregnant and swimming in hormones, trying to _nest_. She had been exactly how I wanted her. And she'd had an abortion? How could she? "So why didn't you fucking _tell_ me?" I almost spat. "Why didn't you call?"

"I tried! I called you over and over, for, like four days straight, but you were in the studio, you were unavailable, you wouldn't come to the phone, I thought you were avoiding my calls... Oh Christ, Danny, I'm sorry. Don't be angry with me. I did it for you. I knew how much that MVC contract meant to you, I knew how much that studio meant to you, I knew how hard you were working on the album, and how long a tour you're about to have to go on. And I knew, when you didn't answer the phone, or ring me back, or anything, that you would not be able to handle everything that was going on in your band's life, and even making the _decision_ whether to have a baby, let alone have to look after a pregnant girlfriend and then an actual baby."

"You're a liar! You're a selfish liar!" I howled at her, smarting with the indignation of wanting to prove her wrong, to assert that it was _not my fault_ for not answering four days of phone calls. "You did it for yourself, for your band, because you wanted your own record to happen."

"I didn't even have a _band_ to happen yet, let alone a record," she protested.

"But you told me yourself, afterwards, even though you didn't tell me what you'd done, that you did it to finally feel like yourself again. You never wanted my child. You didn't do it for me, you didn't it because you did not want my baby."

Her voice was shaking. "Daniel, if you want to believe that, you don't know me."

"I guess maybe I feel like I _don't_ know you any more. The Merry I knew would never have embarked on a decision like this, not without talking to me first. It was Dolores, wasn't it? Dolores and Cindy, those fucking man-haters. They filled you full of this Feminism crap, told you what the fuck right did I ever have, to know that I might have been a father, what the fuck right did I have, to be involved in a decision involving our child's life..."

" _Daniel_ ," Merry snapped sharply, but I was both furious and deeply, deeply upset, all at the same time, too many emotions swirling inside me to stop.

"You could have _waited_ , to speak to me!"

"I couldn't. There was a very tight time limit. Up to the first 3 months, you can have RU-486, and just take a pill to end it. After that, you have to have surgery. I didn't want surgery, and they were pressuring me to make up my mind..."

"So you just _lied_ to me?"

"I didn't _lie_. You just didn't even give me time to tell you," she offered limply.

"Merry, we had a deal, remember? You get pregnant, and I marry you. So you just reneged on the whole deal, and act like that's no big deal? If you had stuck to your part of the bargain, we could be married already." I made a quick mental calculation. "You and me, we would have a baby _right now_." I thought, suddenly, of Dick and Clara, and felt completely cheated. It should have been me, having the first Metropolis baby to be cooed and fawned over, not Dick. It wasn't fucking fair.

"Can you imagine going through all this, going through 9/11, through all this wretchedness, with a child in tow?"

"Well, we wouldn't have been _here_ , would we. I'd probably still be in the studio, and you... you'd be..." She'd be in that loft, with the picture windows looking out over Manhattan, either watching the World Trade Center burn, or being evacuated with a tiny, month-old baby. My head reeled at the thought of it.

"In the _studio_...?" Merry repeated. "Do you have the slightest idea what it's like to care for a baby? Do you have any idea what parenthood involves, beyond this kind of lifestyle accessory thing, your wife, your baby? Have you really thought this through, like I've had to think this through? Do you even know _why_ you want a child so badly when you haven't a clue how to care for one?"

"Why I want a child?" I sputtered, angry that she was putting me on the defensive when she was the one who had done the utterly indefensible thing, without my permission or consent. I had thought the whole thing through more times than she could imagine, and watched my son's life flash forward before my eyes, a baby, a little boy, a young man, Daniel J. Asheton III. I saw teaching my son to ride a bike, teaching him how to play guitar, guiding him through the record collection I would one day leave him. I saw the pride in my own parents' eyes, at their first grandchild... and then suddenly I wondered, was this how my own father had started, wanting desperately to mould his son into a tiny replica of himself? I resented feeling like my father in any way, and suddenly hated her for pushing me into it. "It seems like it's you that didn't want _my_ child."

"I do want your baby, Danny, eventually. But I just think we should let our lives settle down, and get used to... y'know, being married first," she said.

"This is Cindy and Dolores and fucking _feminism_ , isn't it? This is fuck the _Straight White Men_ , isn't it? This is 'marriage is legal slavery' and all that other bullshit poison they've been filling your head with, isn't it?" I wailed, casting about wildly for someone, anyone else to blame to make this whole horrible conversation just _not be true_.

"Stop it!" wailed Merry, putting her hands up over her ears. "Stop blaming my band, stop blaming my friends, stop blaming 'feminism'. This is about you and me, Danny. I want to marry you, I do... but you make it so hard..."

I stood up, shaking my head slowly, feeling my whole world crumbling and sliding away from me, the same way that those horrible films of the World Trade Centre seemed to show the towers melting and cascading away like so much sand. "I don't want to marry you, not after this. I don't want to be with a woman who can _lie_ to me, who can renege on deals, who can muck me about like this. All along, you've never been serious about me. I've always been just some thing that you can sacrifice to your career. You didn't even want me to be your _boyfriend_ , you wouldn't say you _loved_ me, you didn't actually want to be with me. Well, I'm done. No more." Pulling off my ring, I placed it on the coffee table in front of her, and walked away.

"Daniel, I was scared, in the beginning, because this thing between us was so much bigger than I knew how to control. That's why I went through all the silly words and the semantic games... Because I always knew that loving you was something big enough to destroy me. But I... I do actually love you, Danny, in every way that I know how to. I daw you."

"That's not even a word, Merry. It doesn't _mean_ anything."

I took my bag down from the high shelf in the cupboard and filled it with my things, my clothes, the suit that was supposed to be for my wedding. She stood up from the sofa, and tried to touch me, but I pushed her hands away. I didn't kiss her, I didn't even look at her as I left the apartment. I took the tube down to Waterloo, then got on the next Eurostar for Paris. And I sat in Paris for another week, drinking myself into oblivion, until the planes back to New York started flying again. And back at Newark Airport, I found my old suitcase and my guitar in the lost luggage section, as if they had been waiting for me all along. As I signed the receipt for them, I stared at the date. The 23rd. It was my birthday. It had taken only two weeks for my entire life to fall apart. I was 29 goddamn years old, and my life was over.


	42. There Is No There There

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the wake of 9/11, the members of Metropolis are all left reeling, trying to cope with heartbreak, loss and grief. Daniel tries to claw his way back to normalcy, but everything he does to try to make things better with Merry ends up making things worse.
> 
> And though he is too fucked up to notice, his band finally match their critical acclaim with commercial success, scoring a bona fide Top Ten hit. But the success means nothing to him, without someone to share it with.

I drank; it was the only way through it. I drank as I came home to find the first leg of our tour had been cancelled, and the second leg rescheduled for early 2003, leaving me too many empty weeks to fill the best I could with drinking. I drank as I loaded all of Merry's things into boxes, disgusted by the thick film of greasy dust that my apartment had accumulated in my absence, that all of Lower Manhattan seemed to have accumulated after 9/11, along with that awful, slightly smoky, slightly rotting smell that did not fade for months. I packed her clothes, her books, her records into crates and shifted them down into the storage lockup in the basement, then gave my sister the key with the instructions to give it to Merry when she came looking for her things. Then I changed the locks on my loft and tried to get on with my life.

But my life, like the lives of everyone else on Manhattan seemed to have been bent out of shape, and permanently. It wasn't just my personal holocaust, it was like gaping holes had been torn out of the lives of everyone I knew. So I buried my own impossible grief under 3000 other griefs. "You know Blandford Lannings' father died in the World Trade Center," my sister told me. "You really should sign the Asheton condolence card."

"Henry Lannings?" I stuttered as I opened my second bottle of Chablis that afternoon. "Dead?" Henry Lannings, that we'd once made fun of for being so bowled over by Merry's beautiful looks and 'good breeding'. He'd sent a wedding gift we'd never got around to returning, a pretty, carved alabaster fruitbowl that now held spare keys, loose screws and guitar picks.

"There are so many people, just missing, you know. My boyfriend's sister's husband, he never came home from work that day. Two kids, they have. She goes down to the site every day and hands out flyers, but it's been weeks. He's not coming back, but she just can't seem to accept it. The kids don't even know how to cope. Joe's been taking them off her hands, and I've been helping to babysit them, but it is fucking rough, looking in their eyes and trying to figure out to hide it from them, that their dad is never coming home."

"Christ." I finished my glass of wine and poured another. No, I was not going to cry. I didn't even know who I was crying for, for Pris's boyfriend's sister's husband, or for Henry Lannings, or for my own aborted Daniel J. Asheton III, or just for myself. But I had to gulp down my wine before the grief just swamped me.

Over the next few weeks, it became almost like a kind of New York ritual, the slow piecing together of rumour, the grass-roots spread of news, as people who were merely 'missing' failed to turn up for weeks, and eventually months, as hope sputtered and gave out. People I hadn't heard from in years crawled out of the woodwork, emails or phone calls or those weird, awkward meetings on the street where we'd fill each other in on the litany of the living and the confirmed dead and the merely _missing_. Some people just wouldn't give up hope, they'd go down to the site again and again, replacing faded Missing Notices as the autumn rains washed the faded ink, but not the pain away.

And Cindy Birdweather, it turned out, was one of those people who just would not give up that fierce spark of hope. I had no idea; no one had told me. It was almost as if, since I'd come back from London a broken man - a ghost of my former self - that my bandmates were trying to protect me, to spare me from the pain of knowing. They all knew about Merry; they all knew about how much I'd loved her, and how it had destroyed me to lose her, but the funny thing was, I didn't remember _telling_ them. I mean, that wasn't unusual, I was drinking so heavily at that point that there were a lot of things I just didn't remember - whole days, sometimes even weeks that slid by in an alcoholic blur until I found out I'd somehow managed to do something really important, like reschedule an entire tour during that missing period. But I _really_ didn't remember having any conversation with my bandmates, or, more precisely, to my great relief, I didn't remember anyone muttering any kind of stupid condolences to me. In fact, I rather suspected that Merry had told Cindy, and Cindy had told Dieter, and Dieter had wound some kind of protective spell around me, like, do not talk to Daniel about heavy shit, he cannot handle it right now. But it was Dieter who let it slip, one afternoon when he turned up unexpectedly at my apartment, looking uncharacteristically shaken.

"What are you doing here?" I stuttered, opening another bottle of wine and handing him a glass of Chablis to steady his nerves. "I mean, it's always nice to see you, Dee, but... With this unexpected time off, I thought you'd be on a mountain somewhere."

"No, we're in New York for the foreseeable." He paced a little, his long black coat flapping around his legs as he churned up and down the length of my loft before stopping at the picture windows, to stare at the weird blank space in the skyline where the towers should be. "OK, fine. I fibbed and told Cindy a little white lie that you and I had an urgent band meeting so that she wouldn't expect me to go down to Ground Zero with her again this morning," he shrugged, though I could see the white knuckles on the stem of his wineglass.

"What's Cindy going to Ground Zero for?" I asked innocently, though it was a patently stupid question. People only went to Ground Zero for one reason - and it was never a what, it was a who.

"You don't _know_?" asked Dieter, and for a moment, I caught a glimpse of the old Dieter beneath the handlebar hipster moustache, that tiny burst of crowing pride that he knew something his interlocutor did not.

"Know what?" I shrugged, and in that moment, I saw the sudden _oh shit_ pass across Dieter, like he'd let loose something he wasn't supposed to tell me. "Dieter, tell me."

A series of emotions flickered across his face, so odd for me to see, as I'd always found Dieter so aloof, even arrogant, his expression almost totally inscrutable, impossible to read. But after the initial flash of panic, his face gave way to vulnerability, his eyes wide and his lips trembling slightly. Dieter, of all people, needed to talk. Even to me. "It's Barry."

I felt something open inside me for a second, like a great gulf of fear threatening to rise up and overwhelm me, but I seized my wine and drank the terror away. "What's happened to Barry? Oh god..." This one was too close. Pris's brother-in-law, he was just some unknown, abstract entity. Henry Lannings, he was someone I hadn't seen in five years. But Barry? Jesus fucking Christ, no.

Dieter sank down to the kitchen table, burying his face in his hands. "It's my fault. He wouldn't have even been there if it wasn't for me."

"Been where?" I asked, in a stupid, dead tone, though I knew the answer before he even replied. There was only one _There_ these days, that people spoke about in that reverend, hushed tone.

"When I was training in the French Alps earlier this summer, I saw the most beautiful chalet for sale. He and Cindy had been talking about buying a vacation home in France for a while, so I suggested the Alps; kill two birds with one stone, as it were, so we could have a holiday home, and a climbing base. A nice, cosy, family chalet. Barry loved the idea - so he made an appointment to see his financial adviser about raising the capital to buy it. That appointment was in the North Tower for 8.30 on Tuesday morning." Dieter's voice, normally so confident, so self-contained, wavered dangerously. "None of us have heard from him since."

"It was not your fault," I said softly, even as I felt a sickening wave of... well, it wasn't shock, or even surprise any more. It was just an empty, hollow feeling of deadness. Barry, the jovial, middle-aged Californian Santa Claus, the man who had intersected with my life in so many all-too-important ways. Barry, who had signed Downtime. Barry, who had guided my band through those impossible recording sessions. Barry, who it felt like only last month had been giving me such fatherly advice about my masculinity. Barry. The idea that he was just... gone. It felt inconceivable.

Dieter raised his face towards me, his black eyes pleading, and I noticed for the first time that the whites of his eyes were red as if from crying. I'd never seen Dieter cry over anyone. "I can't go down there any more. It stinks like a charnel house. And even worse, the stench of desperation. I've tried to be there, for Cindy, as best as I could... She's been staying at Fancy Delancey, and I've been doing my utmost to look after her, make sure she has everything she needs, every kindness, ever consideration, but..." I had never seen Dieter look so bereft, his face absolutely devastated. "Barry was so kind to me. He was like... he was like a father to me. Cindy, obviously, is devastated, and I'm trying to be strong for her, to be there for her, but... I'm out of my depth, Daniel. I love her so much, that to see her hurting... I cannot bear to see her in pain. How is it, that she hurts, and yet I feel the pain, too?"

"That's... _love_ ," I stuttered, remembering with a sharp ache the almost telepathic bond that Merry and I had once shared. "That's how it works."

"I thought love was supposed to be wonderful. It was Cindy, in fact, who told me about the redemptive power of love, to heal and soothe. I feel like I've been sold a false bill of goods; I had no idea it could _hurt_ so much, and yet one could still just go on loving. I always bailed before - before it could get too intense. Because I didn't want to risk getting hurt. Leave before you get attached - it's always the safest option."

"So why don't you leave now?"

Dieter looked back at me as if I were insane. "Because I _love_ her. Losing her would mean losing the better half of myself. I just wish... it didn't hurt so much."

I stared back at Dieter, trying to make sense of the pain on his face, and feeling utterly unable to respond to him. Love hurting? He and Cindy had only been together six months at most, what on earth could he know about love and how much it could hurt? My whole chest, if I let it, was just an aching cavity of hurt, so much hurt that this new pain, this loss of Barry, it barely registered. I knew I had to say something, knew I had to respond somehow to that look of need and desperation on Dieter's face, but I had no words left.

So instead, I reached out, and I laid my hand, silently, on top of Dieter's, lying helplessly on the table in front of him. I moved my lips, mouthed the words 'I'm sorry,' but no real sound came out. For a moment, Dieter just stared at my hand, lying on top of his, and I realised in that instant, how unusual it was for me to ever touch him. In all the years I'd known him, I could maybe count on the fingers of one hand, how often he and I had purposefully touched one another's skin. And yet, as he looked at my hand lying on top of his own, and an almost palpable relief flooded his face, I knew it was the right thing to have done.

He shifted slightly, turned his hand palm up and clasped my hand in his, squeezing firmly, then holding on like a drowning man clinging to life. I squeezed back gently, stared down at his long, elegant fingers, the slight olive tone where the dark hair of his arms was starting to crawl down his wrists, then started to rub my thumb back and forth across his be-ringed knuckles, just so he knew I was still there, and still listening to him. And for the next twenty minutes - half an hour, I don't even know how long - we sat there together in silent solidarity, me holding onto him with one hand, as Dieter put his head down on my kitchen table, and started to quietly sob. And with the other hand, I reached out and poured the other half of the bottle of wine slowly down my throat to stop myself from feeling a goddamn thing.

Finally, when Dieter seemed all cried out, he raised his head and started to wipe his face with his sleeve. I stood up and found some kitchen roll and handed it to him, so he could try to mop himself up, then offered to open another bottle of wine. "Do you want another drink? I'm here as long as you need me."

"No, but thank you. I should really be back at Fancy Delancey when Cindy returns, and I need to be sober for that." He smiled a tight-lipped smile as I fussed around him, proffering tissues, another piece of kitchen roll. "But Daniel..." He turned, just as he got to the heavy industrial door to the apartment, and said, quite clearly "I love you."

" _What_?" I stuttered, wondering if I'd misheard, feeling my head reeling, terrified he had misread the whole _holding his hand_ thing.

Dieter grinned, and for a second, there was the old Dieter, cocky and arrogant and deeply amused. "Not like that, you asshole." But then his face grew serious again. "I never told Barry how much I cared about him, how much he did for me, and now he's gone. You are the closest thing I have to a brother. I know we fight, and we have always fought..."

I shrugged lightly, trying to dispel the weight of the moment. "I don't take it seriously. It's like Pris, when she bickers and picks on me. I know that's just how you show affection."

"I just wanted to make sure you know." Dieter's face resumed his customary smirk as he headed off down the stairs.

"Well, don't you go stepping off any mountains any time soon, you hear?" I called after him. Then suddenly, abruptly, a memory came resurfacing up into the light, of me telling someone I loved her, and her saying nothing back. "I love you too, asshole!" I shouted down the stairwell.

Far below, a face appeared between the railings, Dieter's eyes lit up in that little-boy grin I had only ever seen at Catskills Mansions. But the moment passed, and the head was withdrawn, replaced with a single middle finger raised in affectionate salute. Feeling a weird tightening in my chest, I went back inside and opened another bottle.

I drank my way through the interviews and promotional work for Mountaineering, letting Doyle and Dieter field most of the questions. I drank my way through filming my shots for the video for _Menage A Trois_ , against a blue screen, with a three-day beard and a pair of aviator shades to cover my bloodshot eyes and my puffy face. And I drank my way through the tour, through the never-ending year-long tour for Mountaineering. And I was good at drinking. I didn't lose my temper, I didn't lose my shit, I mostly just sat there, sozzled, being quietly numb. I didn't remember any of it. I didn't remember the gigs, the crowds, the venues, anything but the endless bottles of wine, onstage, backstage, on the bus. I didn't remember the reviews or the accolades or the awards, either. I just remember the sick, hollow, dead feeling that refused to go away, no matter how much I drank.

Mountaineering, which sold so well it went Gold, and I hung the actual gold record in my bathroom. Mountaineering, whose dark, fractured, jangling aura of paranoia caught a mood in post-9/11 America and gave the public some kind of face to its own nightmares. Mountaineering which won awards and accolades, not just in its own right as our piece of art, but as Barry Michaels' last production work before his untimely demise in 9/11. It was a hook, and people loved personal hooks to hang stories around, even if the album full of loss and grief had been completed well before the loss of the man whose absence we were supposedly grieving. A ton of people - industry people who might not otherwise have noticed us - heaped praise on Mountaineering as a way of memorialising Barry.

MVC's marketing might won our band profiles in Time Magazine and prominent spots on AOL's homepage and eMusic, now that the Internet was becoming a major force in music distribution. _Menage_ went top 10. We appeared on Letterman, again, playing the second single, _There Is No There There_ \- which went to number 2 on the singles chart - though this time, being on the TV wasn't quite such a kick, and Dave made dumb jokes about our new fashion choices. The song was everywhere, that tense, frenetic riff soundtracking everything from special news reports about the WTC to adverts for NFL kick-offs. Number 2. It meant nothing to me. Without Merry as a benchmark, it was just a fucking failure, getting to second place, and no higher.

The New York Times wrote a long, considered article about New York City artists' reactions to 9/11, and spent a large part of the article comparing and contrasting Mountaineering - and especially _There Is No There There_ \- with the strange films and loops that Will Zarnetski had made from his iconic tapes of the World Trade Center's collapse. That iconic angel on his balcony, overlooking the collapsing buildings, it seemed some totemic harbinger of doom, the cheap plasterwork being eaten away by acid rain. Metropolis were now not just seen as popular artists, and a best-selling band, but also Important Artists with Things To Say About Important Issues. And eventually, to Doyle's great delight, some of his lyrics ('Look out the window / (there is no there there) / what have all the angels done? / (there is no there there) / a cloud of shining dust / a tower / the angels loosed an atom bomb') were actually quoted in a London Review of Books discussion of the effect of 9/11 on American poetry.

The irony being, of course, that TINTT was not even about 9/11, it was written nearly a year before, about the effects of gentrification, and in specific, a notorious shooting gallery near Doyle's bar in Williamsburg that had been knocked down to build a huge, new posh block of condos. The tower in the song was a literal tower, that now blocked the riverfront view from Doyle's bedroom window, not a reference to the WTC. Not that that mattered to the people who declared it an anthem for post-9/11 New York, and bought it, and the album, in droves. For all its birthing pains, Mountaineering finally brought me the fame and the recognition and the almost chart-topping single I craved so much, but which I was in too much of an alcoholic blur to even acknowledge.

For the first six months, I was just a never-ending open nerve of grief and pain, picked up and delivered to gig after gig like an automaton. I didn't really care what happened to me. I slept with a couple of women on the road, drunken fumbles which went awfully wrong, ending in tears and recriminations, but not even the physical release of orgasm released me from the agony in my head. Merry had lied to me, Merry had gone back on The Deal, Merry had aborted our baby. I didn't really remember that first half year, and I winced to remember the drunken emails I'd sent her from lonely hotel rooms, the occasional drink'n'dials to her mobile, recriminating against her.

I couldn't help myself; it was like an obsession. After a couple of drinks, I'd get out my mobile and find myself dialling her number. I swear, every time I started with the best intentions, I was going to tell her I loved her, talk it through, just get some closure, some answer out of her as to _why_. Why hadn't she been able to love me like I loved her. And she wouldn't answer of course, but getting her answering service would just infuriate me, so that I'd start out sobbing, and end up furious, screaming down the line, screaming about how all that Feminism had ruined her, calling her awful, ugly, horrible names.

And in the morning, tearful, hungover, I'd stare at the number of call attempts I didn't even remember making, and feel sick to my stomach. I sent her a grovelling email the first or maybe second time I did it, telling her I'd been drunk and hadn't meant it, and begging her forgiveness.

'Don't email me again, Daniel,' she had written back coldly. 'It's over, and this is not helping. Goodbye.'

I hated the coldness of that reply, and immediately emailed her back, hoping to catch her online, begging her to just pick up the phone, we could talk about it, if she'd just give me the chance...

'I am blocking your email address. Do not contact me again.'

"u don't mean that, just let me talk to u...' I fired back, but the email bounced. She'd blocked me. How the fuck could she do that?

I resolved not to call her again, even deleted her contact from my phone, but it was no use. Her number was always in the Recent Calls list, and the moment I was drunk, it was like a compulsion I couldn't break, just dialling up to hear the sound of her voice on her answerphone, then rambling incoherently and drunkenly into her machine. Losing all sense of self control, I called the damn number whenever I was drunk - which was most of the time those days. I couldn't even tell you what I was trying to achieve, maybe I was just desperately trying to keep some connection open between us, even if it was a connection of hatred and bile spilled out across lonely long distance connections.

After weeks of calling to no response, one evening, I was surprised when the phone picked up and a man came on the line. "Dan, don't call here any more," he told me abruptly.

"Who is this?" I snapped, furious at the interloper.

"Dan, mate, don't do this. You are just making this harder for her. She doesn't want to talk to you, I'm serious." Gabe. I would have recognised his accent anywhere.

"Gabe, come on, it's me," I insisted. "You know I love her - and you know that she loves me."

"Not any more, mate, not any more."

"Shut the fuck up, you liar!" I snapped, months of frustration letting loose in torrents of fury. "This is your fucking fault, Gabe, if you'd just passed on the message that she was off getting an abortion when I called your house... if you'd just said something, anything, I'd have flown out there... I could have stopped her... none of this would have ever..."

"I'm hanging up now, Daniel. Don't ring again."

I hit redial, but the line was engaged. I rang and rang and rang, but then the line was dead, like the number itself had been disconnected. "Fuck," I swore down the bad transatlantic connection listening to the blaring tone of the dead line. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

Digging in my address book, I found Gabe's mobile number and rang that. It rang twice, then went to answerphone. "Gabe, pick up. I know you're there with her, don't even fucking pretend she's not right there." I opened another bottle of wine, then screamed abuse down the line until it, too, went dead, then passed out amidst sheets sopping wet from my spilled drink.

My cellphone blared in my ear, way too early the next morning. Without even opening my eyes, I reached for it - was it Merry at last, returning my calls? "Hello?" I croaked.

"Danny," said a woman's voice at the other end of the line. My heart leapt. Only one woman called me that. Had I finally got through to her, to finally make her call me back?

"Merry?" I gasped, opening my eyes, wincing against the light of day, trying to work out where the hell I was and why my face and shirt were all damp.

"It's your sister."

My heart collapsed back into ruins as I slumped back against the mattress, though the dank smell of rancid wine was almost overpowering. Had I thrown up, on top of the spilled wine? Gross. "Pris. What's up."

"Danny, I'm not going to mince words with you. You need to stop harassing Merry."

"Harassing?" I stuttered. "I have not been harassing anyone, I have just been _trying_ to get her to... to talk to me..."

"Danny, I am looking at her mobile phone statement right now. Her lawyer dropped it off this morning, do you understand? Her _lawyer_. You have rung her cellphone a hundred and forty-seven times in the past month."

"Are you fucking kidding me? This is some kind of mistake."

"You bet your fucking ass this is some kind of mistake, Danny. A big one. If you don't knock it off, they are going to go to the police, and file charges against you, to get an order of protection. If you call Merry - or Gabe, or any member of her band - again, you are going to end up with a police record."

"What? You think I called her a hundred and... forty... whatever... How can I have even...?" I tried to make sense of the impossible number, but nothing in my impossible life made sense any more.

"You do realise that your band will not be able to tour if you end up with a criminal record?" The steel in Pricilla's voice scared me a little. My band? I didn't care what anyone did to me, but the thought of my band... that still moved me.

"Shit." I tried to hold it together, but my voice was crumbling. "If she would just talk to me, Pris, I could explain everything..."

"You are never talking to her again. And if you carry on the way you have been, you are going to land yourself in court."

"If I could just apologise... how the hell am I supposed to apologise, to make it up to her, if I can't even fucking speak to her?" I begged. "How on earth am I supposed to make this right, Pris?"

"You make this right by never, ever contacting her again. You make this right by backing the fuck off and leaving her alone. Do I make myself clear, little brother?"

Rolling over onto my back, I winced as the wet patch on the bed seeped between my shoulder blades, then rubbed my eyes with my free hand. "OK," I said, and realised that I meant it.

After saying goodbye to my sister, I stumbled to my feet and staggered to the window. There was a beach outside, though I had no idea what ocean it even was. I'd lost track of countries somewhere along the endless tour. Pushing my feet into my shoes without bothering to find my socks, I picked up my suit jacket and slung it around my shoulders, feeling for my hotel key as I stumbled outside into the bright white light of morning. I walked across the beach, then kicked off my shoes by the water to find the sand blistering hot and the water refreshingly cold. Rolling up my trousers, I waded out knee-high, then took my phone out of my pocket and looked at the Recent Calls one more time. A hundred and forty-seven calls? You are fucking kidding me.

Weighing the phone carefully in my hand, I took a step back, then wound up like a pitcher and hurled the thing as far as I could, off into the turquoise blue ocean, where it bounced slightly off a wave, then disappeared beneath the water with a fizz of electricity, then a satisfying plop. It was over. It really was over.

Over the next six months, the pain and anger gave way to a kind of hollow deadness. I regretted everything. I desperately wanted her back, I felt her absence keenly, as a kind of hole in my life, I would have forgiven her anything. But of course she wouldn't even take my calls; why would she, when I'd been so horrible to her? And so I began to watch her from afar, again. I bought The Racists' album, _Passing_ , and wondered if that was a deliberate dig. The album itself was amazing, angry and incandescent, yet layered and beautiful. It had delivered on all of the promise of those showcase gigs, but it hurt me, almost physically, to listen to it. Because I, alone, knew that the catastrophe and devastation she was singing about was not the pain of terrorism, but our own, personal holocaust writ large.

The Racists had been banned from entering the States. Merry's green card had been revoked for "un-American activities", the band had been placed on a watch list, and all of their visa applications denied. That didn't stop James from releasing the record, and watching the controversy do wonders for its sales, as the US entered first one, and then two pointless wars, and completely squandered any good will or sympathy it still held over 9/11. Blocked from performing in the States, The Racists took to the web instead. Mandy designed them a beautiful website, and every week they posted new tit-bits of films, live performances, odd video art and MP3s on the site.

"It's been done," sneered Dieter. "It's just a rip-off of the marketing campaign that Radioshack launched for their Plan B album." I thought that Dieter was actually jealous that Metropolis hadn't thought to do anything quite so clever with our own website, which, despite the injection of MVC cash, looked great, but was still static and a bit boring, except for the thriving messageboard, still presided over by the endlessly loyal Becca. I made an effort to make sure I posted news every now and then, Dick posted tour photos, either by him or his wife, and Doyle sometimes posted playlists of his favourite tracks when he could remember the password to his account, but Dieter certainly never did so mundane as post a damn update.

But in Europe, and the Middle East, and South America, any places where the US was not held in high esteem, The Racists became huge. It was like Merry was getting her own back on the world, and doing it over, her way.

I read her press obsessively, almost compulsively. And oddly, Dieter encouraged me in this, as this seemed to be the first of Merry's projects that he genuinely loved. It was Dieter, in fact, who found the interview in Third Wave Magazine, though he claimed he would never actually buy a feminist magazine, and come on, it was obvious that he had nicked it from Cindy.

"Does she mention me?" It was the only thing I ever really wanted to know.

"A bit..." Dieter warned. "But I wanted you to hear this from me, not discover it for yourself."

 

Merry Wythenshawe is suspicious of the press, and with good reason. From her very first Rolling Stone feature, for which she claims to have been plied with alcohol and coerced into posing topless, the relationship has been an uneasy one. Feted more for her cheekbones and her high profile relationship than for her killer basslines and her winning way with a droll lyric, she retreated behind the mask of her carefully stage-managed public personna. "I am a cipher," she claimed during her Deltawave days. "I am a mouth for other people's lyrics and a screen for the projection of other people's fantasies, so why should I destroy that illusion with my own mundane biographical details." Speaking to Third Wave Magazine for the first time about her new band, The Racists, Wythenshawe spills the beans on aesthetics, politics, love, the roles that female musicians get pushed into, and her unacknowledged roles in the history of two bands.

**Third Wave Magazine: Let's start by talking about the aesthetic of the group. There's a very strong visual component, and you have stated that you consider your video director and your costume and stage set designer to both be official parts of the collective.**

Merry Wythenshawe: That was very deliberate, this time out. We wanted to have a look. A complete aesthetic. I had a friend - our producer, actually - who I talked to a great deal about our aesthetic, as we recorded the album, who kept saying he always admired bands that had a kind of 'syllabus'. Who were able to invent a complete world: if you're into this band, then you're into these writers, these films, these visual artists. I had never thought about it that way before. So we sat down and we thought up a deliberately diverse list of artists, writers and thinkers whose work we wanted to refer to: bell hooks, Angela Davis, Joanna Russ, Yoko Ono, Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Twyla Tharp. We wanted to present a whole vision of what we were about; a gestalt, if you will. And, yet, within that aesthetic to point out that we are four very unique individuals with very distinct looks, as multiple focal points, instead of just one front person, with anonymous backing band.

**3WM: Was that a reaction against Deltawave? I know you've talked before about feeling uncomfortable with the way your management and record company pushed you into being the visual face of that band.**

MW: A bit, yes... OK, a lot. What I resented was being a mouthpiece for other people's lyrics, other people's ideas. I became a musician to communicate, to tell my story, but being in Deltawave was no different to being a model, really, a blank canvas. But in The Racists, it's very much to do with who I'm working with. I deliberately chose people who had their own, very strong, very unique aesthetics. It was important to me that my bandmates were all artists in their own right, with their own creative visions. And that they were coming from other disciplines, as well. Bringing together choreography and set design and film-making. I mean, we consider Mandy, our videographer, as much a part of the project as the band members. But even in our musical styles, we are very distinct, and the melange is more interesting than any of us individually. Dolores is very clean, very minimal, everything perfectly balanced and restrained, while JohnRoger is much more baroque, very elaborate and elegant, quite textured. I tend to be very formal, very into repetition, everything carefully mapped out, while Gabe is from a jazz background, and far more into improvisation and just winging it. And the musical tension that results between the four of us, well, it's much more interesting than if we were all just coming from the same place and all doing the same thing.

**3WM: It reminds me a bit of an art-rock version of the Spice Girls.**

MW: OK, please can we not use that term?

**3WM: What term, the Spice Girls?**

MW: No, art-rock. Like, not the 'art' part, because art is fine, I like art, I think it's legitimate to say that we make art. But 'rock'. Because I really feel like rock represents everything - straight, white, male, hard, rock-like - that we are not, in fact, we are trying to get away from. I'm done with rock.

**3WM: OK, fair enough; the whole 'each member has their own look and own cartoon personality' is much more pop than rock, I grant you that.**

MW: It's funny, because do you know who I actually got it from, is Metropolis. The four of them, I know, when Danny put together the band, he told me he made a very conscious decision to choose people for their aesthetics and their sensibilities, rather than their chops. And it works, because with Doyle Saunders up front, that band could very easily have been one frontman and four anonymous blokes in the back, but every member of that band is interesting. You look at them and how they present themselves, and you know instantly what they're about. You've got Doyle, who is very much, he's kinda preppy, but he's a poet, he's a bruised romantic. Then there's Dieter who's, like, arty, intellectual, hedonist dandy, a bit dangerous, and Dick is this very down to earth Texan, a real Southern gentleman. And then there's Danny, this dapper little mod perfectionist who is secretly running the whole show.

**3WM: I never thought of it that way. You make them sound like some indie rock BoyBand.**

MW: As if they're not? It's just funny to me, that people have always asked me about my image, and my clothes, and my hair, even when Deltawave made a big effort to downplay our physical appearances, yet no one has ever talked about how much _Image_ plays in Metropolis' success. I guess, because they're boys, so they're automatically taken seriously. You know, men act; women appear.

**3WM: Do you want to talk a bit about Daniel Asheton, and his influence on your career. (A long term couple; they have split recently) I was surprised at how little this record sounds like someone who was ever involved with Metropolis. Was that a deliberate decision?**

MW: Why should it sound like him? (bristling) He was my partner, not my bandmate. I thought you were supposed to be a feminist magazine, and here you are, asking me about my clothes and my boyfriends. Why don't you ask me about my politics? We've made a very political album.

**3WM: But when you live with someone, surely you have some kind of effect on one another's tastes. I know that my partner has changed my taste in music, opened my mind, turned me onto new things.**

MW: Sure. People influence each others' tastes all the time when they're in any kind of a relationship. But why the assumption that that influencing only goes one way? OK, I've just spent ten minutes about things I learned from Daniel, in terms of his band and how they presented themselves. But I don't like it, this assumption that I should sound like 'someone who dated a member of Metropolis'. Why shouldn't he sound like someone who dated me? Because this is the part that people always leave out. They ask me about Danny's influences on me, but they never mention the influences that I had on him.

**3WM: Such as?**

MW: Well, I mean, when I first met Metrpolis, they were totally a straight-ahead guitar-rock post-punk band. They started hanging around Deltawave, suddenly there's synths all over their first album.

**3WM: But that goes both ways. Daniel is credited with guitar on the second Deltawave album.**

MW: He played my ebow on one song. He happened to be up with us in the studio that weekend, and he was curious, because he'd never seen one before. And did you notice, that he nicked my ebow, and the second Metropolis album, there's ebow all over it? At least we gave him credit for that riff... I mean, I wrote the bassline for _Ugly_. Did I ever get the slightest credit for that?

**3WM: You wrote the bassline for Ugly? But that's pretty much the archetypical Metropolis song.**

MW: Exactly! You know, when Danny played me the demo for _Ugly_ , I knew straight away, this song is gonna be a fucking hit. But Dieter's bass, he was playing this straight-ahead kinda Kim Deal thing, dur-dur-dur-dur. I picked up Danny's guitar, and I was like, 'that's all wrong, this needs to be more funky, it needs to swagger more' and I played him what I thought it should be. He goes back in the studio and overdubs that exact line. And in the final mix, the song starts with basically just 20 seconds of that bassline. Did I ever get any credit for it? Nope. But you talk about my album, and you want to know which bits Danny wrote? Come on. This is all the exact shit I talk about in the track _Oppressive, Omnipresent (Heteronormativity)_ , right here. How women's contributions are downplayed or erased.

**3WM: OK, moving onto the lyrics. Did you deliberately make a choice to obscure the themes of the album with obtuse, academic terminoloy?**

MW: This stuff isn't academic, though. The titles are a kind of shorthand, but the lyrics are very simple, very immediate. We are talking about our direct lived experiences in these songs, and I know we are getting into some pretty heavy stuff, because I am singing about abortion, and Dolores is singing about the pressure of growing up lesbian in a very strict, traditional Chinese family. But it's trying to draw a link between these words and the experiences they mean, like, this is the theory, this is the praxis.

**3WM: But then you use words like 'praxis' and song titles like _Kyriarchy Over And Out_ and you expect people to understand them.**

MW: I don't insult our listeners, by assuming that they are incapable of hopping on Google, or going to a library, and figuring it out. When I was a kid, and I would read the the NME and The Wire, back in the 80s, and I would come across a word I didn't understand - like, say, 'anarcho-syndicalism' in a Crass review - I would go and look it up in the dictionary. Or an artist I'd never heard of, like The Curse would talk about Neu! and I'd be all, who the f*ck is Neu! and go to the library or the record store, and dig. I want our music to be like this, y'know, here is a key. You go and find the lock it fits and open your own door.

**3WM: It has lead to misunderstandings, for example, even calling your band The Racists.**

MW: Yeah, I am aware of that, and that is the risk you have to take. Like, when Gabe and JohnRoger first said they wanted to call the band The Racists, I was like, no way. What does this say about me? Because I am the whitest of white women, I have no right to that word. That is not my word, that is not my oppression. But JohnRoger really spelled it out for me, like, we live in a world where everyone recognises that Racism is a terrible thing, but no one acknowledges the work of Racists, in perpetuating Racism. It's always someone else, someone terrible: that Racist over there, lurking in the bushes, the big baddie, not an entrenched system we all participate in. And yes, I am aware, sitting here, as a white woman, that I am quoting a Person of Colour, co-opting someone else's words and experiences, because you're interviewing me, not JohnRoger, coz I'm the pop star, I'm the one who's had my face on Firbank adverts. But I am now aware, of being The Face, being a front, that I get to choose which stories I get to tell, and who I get to foreground. And if I can use my own privilege, to shine a light on the concept of Privilege itself, in an attempt to name it, and dismantle it, that's what I can do.

**3WM: Can I ask you to talk about the scandal over the _Eye On Asia_ video?**

MW: Ha, OK, yep. Because that was absolutely a lesson in how the Internet can take things completely out of context, and twist your intentions. Because that song, Dolores wrote the lyrics for that song, and it was very obviously about the stereotypes that she faces as an Asian woman. And we were trying to think of how to handle the video, how to make a video that was about stereotypes of Asian women, without falling into the trap of repeating and reinforcing those exact stereotypes. We were playing around with images of Empire, and Dolores said, 'f*ck this. I don't want to be the demure, submissive little 'Oriental' girl, I want to be Queen of the Empire, sitting on a golden throne.' So that is exactly what we did. And I thought the video turned out brilliantly, there's Dolores sitting on a throne, dressed like Queen Elizabeth I, with Gabe and JohnRoger, and Cindy, our manager, all dressed up as courtiers and explorers, in ruffs and beautiful clothes, standing around her, carving up the globe between them like a chocolate cake. And there's me, dressed up in this stupid little Geisha outfit we bought at a sex shop, in the Berlin red light district, on my knees scrubbing the floor in front of her.

**3WM: But, of course, the image that got posted online...**

MW: Yup, the image that got leaked was me, dressed up in this stupid Geisha costume, and all of a sudden there's a thousand angry posts on LiveJournal, going, OMG, Cultural Appropriation, harmful stereotypes, she is, actually, a racist, the name isn't a joke, and it's just like... no, no, no, no, no. This stuff has a context you're not seeing. All these people were reading thinkpieces when they had never seen the video or heard the song. That was tough. But that was an important lesson.

**3WM: How not to do things.**

MW: My whole life has been a lesson in How Not To Do Things. I lived the whole first half of my life in fear. That is the flip-side of a lovely, close-knit scene like the Lacuna Lounge, that I came out of. Everybody is all very supportive, but they're also incredibly conformist. I spend years being afraid. Afraid to speak my mind, afraid to stand up to my bandmates, afraid to stand up to my boyfriend, my manager, my record company. And the first time I did really put my foot down, make a decision by myself, and stand by it, it cost me everything. It cost me my relationship, it cost me my whole world. But it was also the single most liberating experience of my life, because that experience, as awful as it was, informed that first, terrible, utter mistake that was the first Racists single.

**3MW: You're talking about _Emotional Terrorist_?**

MW: Right, that track has taken on so much of a bigger life than I ever had any idea it could. And it feels like I'm diminishing the power of what that track has become, symbolically, by saying, it's about this, when it's become about so much more, in people's minds. But with reproductive rights under threat all around the world, I just wanted to state, categorically, that track is about an abortion. I had an abortion. People think because it's private, that it's shameful. I refuse to be ashamed. When you are talking about abortion, you are talking about many women - and you are talking about me.

**3WM: A pretty powerful statement for someone whose first top ten single was a track called _Shame_.**

MW: And whose next single is, ironically, called _Leave Shame Behind_. That works on so many levels, ha ha. But it was a lesson our producer, Dee (E. Diego de la Xibalba) taught me. Throw people's prejudices and preconceptions right back in their faces. Because he had been through some fucking shit in the past year or two, we laughed and we talked a lot about we called Onset of Celebrity Disorder, and what it did to your head, like some psychological disease. But it was like, after 9/11, we all changed. Enough with the fucking bullshit. Own what you have done, including the f*cking mistakes. Yes, I am the girl stupid enough to have released a single called _Emotional Terrorist_ , a week after 9/11. I can't change that, but we can talk about what it means.  (Laughs.) And if you're going to talk about issues that heavy, you might as well put some nice harmonies and a bit of a disco back-beat on it. After all, it's not a revolution if you can't dance to it, is it?

 

I looked up to see Dieter studying me intently, his eyes bright over the top of his cigarette. I tapped the page as I asked. "Dieter, who's E. Diego de la Xibalba?"

Dieter smirked and smoked, opening his mouth and French inhaling his own fumes. "I wanted to produce a record. I wanted to show that there was more to me than a nazi uniform and an HIV status. Merry and I were in the same place; we worked out a deal."

"You knew how I'd feel about this," I said, feeling betrayed.

"And you knew how I'd feel about you re-recording my basslines the minute I left the studio," Dieter shot back, but then his smirk deepened.  "I knew you never wrote that damn bassline. It was way too good for you."


	43. Out Of Step (With The World)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the Mountaineering tour finally ends, and Metropolis decide to take a long break for the other members to pursue solo careers, Daniel finally hits rock bottom.
> 
> Unable to either return to his old, pre-Merry life, or carve out a new life of his own, he finally falls prey to the same substance abuse issues that have bedevilled the rest of his band. (Just as the rest of his band have finally learned to live clean.) He hits the bottle, and the bottle hits back so hard it nearly kills him. But can he exorcise his demons without alcohol?

Sitting in the artificial cocoon of the tourbus, I was able to keep some kind of structure and form to my life, even as I measured it out in glasses of Chablis. But finally, when the endless Mountaineering tour eventually ended, I found myself cast back into the wreckage of my old life, untethered, with no idea of where to turn. The band splintered. Doyle demanded time off to do a solo album, taking demos he'd been working on, on his computer, while on the road, back to Musketeer, and getting signed in his own right. And though I felt almost betrayed at the idea that Doyle had learned to write songs without me, I could find no real reason to deny him the request. I had no new songs. Songwriting was an emotional expression that seemed to have dried up around the time that Merry had left me.

Wait, no. I left Merry. I could never remember which way round it was. I knew that technically, I had left her - but I never stopped feeling like it was her that had walked out on me. After five years together, life without her was just not something I was the slightest bit equipped to handle, emotionally or physically.

It was like I had two phases of my life: life before Merry, and life after Merry. Now that Merry was gone, my whole life seemed to have just crinkled up like a deflated balloon, and gone into remission. She was right. After 9/11, everything had changed. I wanted to move back to London, and relive that awful argument in the flat all over again, and make the ending turn out different. But deep down inside, I knew I didn't want to move back to London. What I wanted was to move back to 1996 and make my whole life have a different ending. So I tried reverting to my pre-Merry life, trying to remember who the hell I had been before I met that magical blonde.

I tried spending time with Dieter at first, going down to Fancy Delancey and hanging around like we were still at art school. Because Dieter and I - though there was a palpable cooling between Dee and the other band members - Dieter and I were still close, though it was a kind of closeness that seemed to have moved beyond words. But Fancy Delancey, and indeed, the entire Lower East Side had changed to become almost unrecognisable. Dieter had stopped taking drugs entirely, and now palled about with earnest young adventurers, passing through on their way from the Andes to the Alps, or from the Himalayas to the High Canadian Rockies. Dieter's obsession with mountains had not dimmed in the slightest, in fact it only seemed to have grown, over the course of the tour, taking his days off to go on nature hikes up into the Cascades or the Adirondacks. He had climbed an impressive range of peaks in the Alps, climbed both Mount Rainier and Mount St Helen, had bagged over a dozen Munroes, and was talking quite seriously about an attempt on either Tien Shan or one of the lower Himalayas.

He had also, apparently, I found out quite by accident one night, when a serious Aussie rambler had accosted me with the magazine, started writing a column for Trek and Summit Magazine, a serious Alpinist's periodical, under that weird Spanish name, E. Diego de la Xibalba. The column was held in quite high regard both for the quality of his prose, and the rigour of his mountaineering knowledge. But as I was interested neither in mountains, nor in contemporary prose, I felt completely left out, alienated by the talk of crampons and crevasses. And that name, it just reminded me of the betrayal, the double betrayal - that Merry had completely abandoned me, cut me off, but that desertion did not extend as far as my bandmates. Even the loathsome Dieter was more welcome in her life than I was. Close as brothers or not, I soon stopped going round Fancy Delancey so much.

But I was pulled, like a moth, back to Ludlow Street again and again, out of habit more than any genuine affinity. I started dropping in to the Lacuna Lounge, and haunting the bar like a ghost, though some neo-shoegaze band called Foucault 45 were the great white hope of the East Village scene now, and Metropolis seemed old hat, even quaint. Still, I did what I could, keeping an eye on the fresh new crop of bands that my city had thrown up. Branwell's band had come on by leaps and bounds, and I did his best to get them a record deal, and they, too, signed to POW-MIA after I had a quiet word with James and brought him along to a gig. I seemed resigned to my new role as Older Statesman of Rock. I did what I could for Branwell's friends' bands, too; I listened to CDs, I appeared at gigs and dispensed paternal advice, I made introductions and told people where and to whom they should address their demos. Some of the women in those bands even flirted with me, but I recognised it for exactly what it was. My celebrity was a social disease they wanted to catch. I politely ignored them.

And then, one day, I looked out the window, and saw a blonde girl smoking outside the Pink Pony. For a moment, my heart stopped, and time went into reverse, and I was cast back, five, nearly ten years in time, trying to remember the first time that I'd seen Merry waiting for rehearsal. But then the nostalgia cleared, and I realised that it was Marge, who had grown out her bleached-blonde hair. Marge, the manager of the Pink Pony, the woman who had taken my old Ludlow Street flat. So I went over and said hello.

"I bet you don't remember me, do you, Marge?" I teased, sneaking up behind her.

"Oh Christ," she cried, putting her hand to her heart. "You scared me. But no, Daniel Asheton, no girl _ever_ forgets your cute little face."

For a moment, I was taken aback, wondering if she was flirting. But then I thought, why the devil not? I flirted back, and next thing I knew, I was offering to take her to dinner.

Marge eyed me carefully from under long, dark lashes that showed her hair was clearly dyed. "Are you asking me on a date, Dan?"

"Would it be a problem, if I were asking you on a date?" I smiled, a sly half-smile that Merry had always said made me look irresistible. I wasn't even sure I wanted to go on a date, I just knew that Marge was someone who had known me, before I was famous, and who might be able to take my hand and pull me back to the me I'd been before the Onset of Celebrity.

"OK, but so long as that is right out in the open. I will go on a date with you, yes," said Marge, smiling.

I took Marge on a first date, uptown, to a fancy restaurant up on Central Park South, wowing her with the view and the elaborate menu that my rock star pocket could now afford. Marge liked that, but she insisted that our second date should be down on the Lower East Side, on a section of Rivington I had once known as so rough that Dieter had got his front teeth kicked out by skinheads there, but was now lined with trendy bistros. I did like that slightly better, though it wasn't much easier on the pocket. Though I couldn't help but wonder if the Lower East Side had lost something with the dirt and the violent criminals.

And then the third date, we went to a dimly lit bar down at the bottom of Ludlow Street, but I knew that we weren't going to spend much time in the bar beyond the end of our second drink. I knew that Marge was going to ask me back to her place. Could I do this? Could I drink a couple of expensive imported beers in a date bar, and then go back to a girl's place, and have sex with her, and make her my girlfriend? Could I be a boyfriend again? Could I have casual sex, if that's what Marge was offering instead? Could I just go through the motions and just act like a normal fucking human being, whose heart had not been ripped out of his chest in a bedsit in London a year ago?

She did indeed suggest that we go back to her place for a nightcap, and I found myself agreeing, following her back up Ludlow Street, and back up those four flights of wonky stairs, to the apartment that was once my own apartment. Our apartment. My and Merry's first apartment. I ignored the juddering feeling in my stomach, the dizziness in my head, as we passed the chunk of the banister that Merry had once knocked out with her bass cabinet, as we passed the corner where Merry and I had once argued over a dropped bag of groceries, but as Marge let us into the long, twisted hallway where I'd once pressed Merry up against the wall and felt her up for the first time, I felt my head spinning and my breath growing short.

"You know the way," Marge told me, gesturing for me to go into the living room, as she disappeared into the kitchen to fix a drink.

I did indeed know the way, following the crooked hallway down to the main room, but I found it had all been changed. The walls were now painted a girly shade of lilac, the loft bed had been moved to the opposite end of the room, and an entertainment centre put in its place. I felt slightly relieved, that I did not have to be confronted with the bed where Merry and I had made love so many times. But then I heard my name, and turned, to see Merry standing in the hall, under the halogen lights, her blonde hair shining, a glass of wine in each hand.

I looked at her, and thought, that's impossible. But then I felt as if I had been sucker punched in the gut, and dropped to my knees. "Merry," I said, even as I fell. Then realised it was not Merry, could not be Merry, as I crawled my way to the bathroom, where I puked up my guts again and again, then lay down, curled foetal style in the middle of the floor, feeling like I was going to die, with a pain in my gut as intense as if I were giving birth.

"Dan, I'm not Merry," I heard someone say, but my head was swimming as I tried to loosen my tie, and then the nausea caught me again and I tried to raise my head to the toilet bowl. It wasn't beer I was vomiting this time; it was something thick and reddish-black that smelled seriously unpleasant. "I'm sorry, I can't do this. Dan... Dan, are you alright?" As I slid to the cold floor, my eyes twitching and sliding up under my eyelids, I heard her go in the other room and call an ambulance.

 

\----------

 

I woke in a crisp, bright hospital room, and blinked to see my sister staring at me. "Water," I said, my throat creakingly dry.

"You shouldn't need it, you're on a drip," she told me, and I moved my head slightly to see it was true, but still. My mouth was so dry I couldn't speak, so I repeated myself.

"Water." Finally, she brought it, and held it to my face while I sipped, though I didn't quite trust myself to raise my own hand. "Where am I? What happened?"

Pris gazed at me evenly. "You gave everyone quite a scare. I told you being a vegetarian was unhealthy. Will you ever learn to take better care of yourself?"

"What?" What on earth did my eating habits have to do with my passing out on Marge's bathroom floor?

"You're severely anaemic and severely underweight. When they brought you in, you had half the platelet count a man of your age and weight is supposed to have. Your liver is engorged to twice its normal size, and your kidneys are almost totally packed in. You are, in short, little brother, a total mess. You can thank your lucky stars that Marge called an ambulance. Only a last-minute blood transfusion saved your life."

"A transfusion? So they've given me the full Keith Richards blood exchange?" I quipped.

"Don't even try to joke your way out of this. You're not to even look at a drink, let alone pot or coke or whatever you and your rock star chums get up to, for at least a year, if ever. Then you might have a chance of your kidneys regenerating."

"Regenerating? Am I a time lord now?"

"Shut up, Danny. You are 30 goddamn years old now, it is time for you to grow the fuck up and stop joking about everything."

"I am not 30 years old. Not yet. Not for another week..." Suddenly that stopped me sharp. "Wait. What's the date?"

"It's the 25th, Danny. You turned 30 two days ago. And yes, you spent your 30th birthday in a goddamn alcohol-induced coma. Do you get it yet? How serious this is?"

I just stared at her, as the shock slowly sunk in. If I had just turned 30, that meant it had been a year since Merry and I had split up. It didn't feel like a year. It felt like about two minutes since the bandage had been ripped off, and my heart was still aching.

"I mean it. Shape up or you're a dead man."

"I'm already dead," I muttered, sinking back against the pillow. All those plans we'd made, once upon a time, Merry and me, about how we were going to spend my 30th birthday. But now there was no more Merry, and thanks to my stupid, irresponsible drinking, there had been no birthday.

I hated hospitals. I fucking loathed them with something deep and instinctual I couldn't quite explain. I mean, that was something that went back to my childhood, and a memory suddenly flashed up behind my eyes. Grandpa Davis - the feared and yet beloved patriarch of the Hampstead of my youth - a thin but venerable figure yomping up hills in a tweed jacket, my sister and I struggling to keep up with him as he insisted "Just 50 yards to the next pub, troops! Just around the corner!"

Until the day he collapsed, yomping up the hill on his way to the Spaniard Inn at the top of the Heath. I remembered the hushed voices of my parents and my aunts in the hospital corridors, saying words I didn't understand about cirrhosis and liver failure. The wreck of that scary, decrepit... _thing_... in the bed at the Royal Free, that mound of greasy white hair and yellowing skin that bore no resemblance to the Grandpa Davis that I'd known. That single jaundiced eye, the whites turned a yellow nearly the same shade of gold as the hazel of his iris, rolling towards me and telling me in that rasping voice 'Drinking myself to death? I'll show them drinking myself to death, laddie. My life's not worth a damn since your grandmother died. I'd sell my bloody soul for a pint of porter, just nip out to the Spaniard and fetch me one, will you, laddie..."

A shiver passed through me, and I suddenly felt very, very cold, lying in that antiseptic hospital bed, staring at the yellowing tone of my fingernails and recalling the claws of my grandfather's hands as they snaked out to clutch at my elbow one last time, begging for a drink.

"How old was Grandpa Davis when he died?" I asked, then wondered if my sister could even hope to follow the tangled train of thought that had brought me there.

"58," she replied with a deep sigh. "He was only 58, way too fucking young."

I said nothing, trying to recall the tangled chain of events that lead to my family leaving London and moving to New York, shortly after my grandfather's death.

"Yes, he died an alcoholic, Danny, though you were too young to be told about it. So don't even fucking think about it. Shape the fuck up. I am not losing you, too."

 

So I shaped up. I spent a week in the hospital, "drying out", which seemed an odd term for something which involved so many bags of plasma or saline solution being pumped into my veins. I quit drinking cold turkey, pushing through first days of violent shaking to just feeling bleary and tired and indistinct, and then weeks of feeling like someone had ripped a bandage off, and my whole mind was just raw and tingling and slightly soft. How the fuck had Dieter gone through this, alone, through sheer force of will, up in that studio upstate? And Doyle, scratching his arms and whining about heroin; I felt suddenly so guilty for snapping at him. And Dick, oh christ, I cringed to think of the cavalier way I'd criticised Dick for leaving Cranberry Sound to check himself into rehab. How the fuck was I ever to have known? And here I was, in a hospital, on my own, gritting my teeth and feeling like two years of pain had just collapsed on me at once.

Mentally, I was completely shot, but at least physically, I soon started to get better. Without the booze to fill me up, I found I was hungry, ravenous in fact, and started eating properly again, begging my sister to bring me Not Dogs or Chinese Takeaway - though I had to admit, I was never going to eat the hot and sour soup that reminded me of Merry's aborted pregnancy, ever again. The doctors had told me to take massive iron tablets which were supposed to help with the anaemia, and I watched my twig-like arms turn slowly back to human limbs. Once I was out of the hospital, I took up jogging, out to the river, then down to Battery Wharf and back in a loop, taking care to avoid the burned-out blocks of the World Trade Centre, still hidden behind hoardings and smelling faintly of smoke.

My health picked up, and I slowly came back to life. One day, on my run back up the Bowery, I saw Branwell Cortes pop into a juice bar, and thought, hey, I could do with a nutritious smoothie. As we chatted for a few minutes over our banana-pomegranite-goji-berry-superfood shakes, another man in jogging pants and a sweatband came in and peered at me oddly.

On his way back from the juice bar, he drifted over and joined us at our counter. "Dan? Is that Dan Asheton?"

I peered at the greying man leaning over me, then suddenly slid back nearly 20 years in time. "Perry? Perry Jackson? Oh my god, I have not seen you since Collegiate. How's it going?"

We slapped one another's backs and exchanged greetings, catching up briefly on the 15 years since high school in front of a rather confused Branwell, before Perry explained. "I have known this guy since he was 10. Coolest boy at Collegiate; way too cool for school. He used to come in with a Minor Threat badge pinned to his tie and a Dead Letters record tucked up under his arm. This guy turned me on to more music than I can even... wow. Dan Asheton."

"Well, if you want a tip, you should check out this guy's band, Branwell and the Belles. They're awesome. Super-awesome. Check out their new album _Sandstorm_ , on POW-MIA Records," I told him. Branwell blushed all the way to the tips of his flaming hair.

"Will do." Perry seemed to make a mental note of something before turning back to me, gesturing towards my tracksuit. OK, yes, it was indeed a tailored Fred Perry tracksuit I'd bought at Barney's, like I was going to go jogging in anything less. But I thought I looked pretty good in my sporty clothes with my new, wiry physique. "I know this is kind of a long-shot, but you don't still play, do you?"

"Play what? Guitar? Man, you do not keep up with the old school newsletters, do you. I had a number two record this past year," I laughed.

"No, I meant baseball," Perry corrected. "See, me and some of the guys from my hedge fund, we have a baseball team, play at the weekends, sometimes do little pick-up games against the team from Goldman Sachs or the team from Salomon Smith Barney. We're still... down a couple of men, since well... the Twin Towers. But if memory serves, you were pretty handy with a bat..."

"Wait," interjected Branwell, as I blushed at the compliment. " _You_? Played baseball?"

"What?" I protested, feeling like I was being vaguely insulted. "I played baseball, back in high school."

"You just don't strike me as the athletic type. No offence, but you're kinda small. I played at the county level, back in Texas, and man, those guys... they were huge. We would have taken your head off."

"He's small, but he is _fast_ ," whistled Perry. "Like greased lightning. I have seen this guy just slide between the ball and the baseman, too quick to even be caught out." He sipped his supershake appreciatively. "So you played at a county level, huh Branwell. What position?"

"Pitcher," replied Branwell, flexing his long, lanky arms. "They called me the Red Devil."

" _Really_. I don't suppose you two are free this Saturday afternoon," mused Perry. "We play out in Jamaica, Queens, where we rent a private diamond. I could give you guys a ride out from Manhattan, if you're game...?"

Branwell and I exchanged glances, and I could see by the gleam in his eye, that he was going to make me do this, whether I wanted to or not. He had that same, fierce look of excitement and determination that his brother got when he found out there was some local bistro that served roast squid or fried bat or Mongolian tea with yak butter, and he was gonna find it, come hell or high water. And what the hell. Perry had been a jock back in high school, but he had been one of the more decent guys; he even stood up for me once or twice against the stoners. It might be good to try and get back in touch with my distant, long-forgotten high school roots. And so I joined a weekend baseball team, trekking out to Long Island every Saturday for a lively game, and my strength really started to come back. Plus, I liked Branwell, I enjoyed shooting the shit with him and Perry on the way out, and the way back, though I was kinda loathe to explain to both of them why I would join them for a supershake on the way there, but did not want to grab a beer on the way home.

Because life without Merry was something I was finally coming to get used to. But life without drinking was... well, it was weird, and kinda empty. At the same time, I felt like the massive friendly highs of boozing had completely been ironed flat, leaving me emotionally hollow, and yet I felt all raw and jangled by everything. But life without Metropolis? That I could not tolerate. I had to find something, anything, to fill the gap and provide my life with meaning again.

When Taylor's number popped up on the caller ID of my new cellphone, my heart leapt - was it about the band? An offer of a new tour, someone wanting us to do a new album, a new video, anything... Though my heart felt absolutely leaden at the idea of going back on the road, still, some habit in me still pricked up its ears like an old warhorse desperate to get back into harness.

But no, it wasn't even about my band. "Daniel, I knew this was gonna be a bit of a sensitive issue, so I wanted to run it by you first, instead of letting Sandra just drop the bombshell in your lap, or on the other hand, just saying no out of hand, in case you were mad at me for not telling you about it..."

"OK, what is it?" This could only be bad from the amount of hedging she was doing. Taylor always just came out and said things straight up, it was one of the things I appreciated most about her.

"There's this new British music magazine called Careless Talk Costs Lives. They're a bit unconventional, a bit political, a bit feminist. They're putting together a big retrospective on Deltawave, and on the Racists in preparation for their second album, and getting a whole bunch of different viewpoints of people who were there, to talk about Merry."

"Oh," I said quietly. Even her name just set my heart off pounding. Would that ever go away?

"OK, never mind, I'm sorry, Daniel, I shouldn't have brought it up. I can hear you're not into it. I'll fob them off with getting Dieter to talk about producing the record or something..."

"No," I interrupted. "I'll do it." I heard my voice say it aloud, barely believing what I was saying. I'd spoken on impulse, but as soon as it was out there, I knew it was the right thing to do.

"Are you sure? You don't have to do it. I know you're a very private person, and this is probably really weird for you to talk about."

"I want to," I assured her. "I think I do need to talk about it, and in public, until it stops being weird. You know, a long time ago, I never used to understand why Dieter used the press as a kind of therapy. But now I'm starting to think that he had the right idea after all."

"If you're sure... do you want me to be there? Or Sandra? I can set it up so one of us is there if you need the support?"

"No, that's OK, though it's really kind of you to offer. I think I want to do this as a phone interview. In some ways, it's easier to talk when you can't see the person you're talking to." And also, it would be easier to pretend I was talking to Merry, and not the pleasant, bubbly, English girl who rang me bright and early one morning, as I sat in basking in the warm sunshine of my loft's giant windows. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and then dug into the familiar story.

 

**Careless Talk Costs Lives: So is it true that you discovered Deltawave?  
** Daniel J. Asheton Jr: Well, in a roundabout way, I guess I was the one that made it happen. Really, it was Charlene at the Lacuna who 'discovered' them, in that, she put them on with Metropolis, thinking that we were quite similar aesthetically, and we would get along. Which was a stroke of genius, really, I don't think Charlene gets enough credit for how she was the midwife for our whole scene. But yeah, I invited Barry (the late Barry Michaels, producer of Deltawave's two albums - ed) down to that night, to see my band, and we both saw Deltawave for the first time together. It was like fate, how everything kicked off that night. So it wasn't specifically me, it was just a series of synchronicities that I happened to be involved with.

**CTCL: You're very modest. You initially did A &R for Deltawave, through the period of their early success. Merry has credited you with pushing her to write songs and front the band.  
**DJA: It was Bebe (Newcolm, head of A&R at Windlass) who wanted her to front the band. Right from the start, I knew that Merry was the one with star quality in that band. We all did. The songwriting thing came later. Because we were together, I would hear the demos of the songs Merry was writing, before she took them to her band. I just knew, as soon as I heard them, they were something truly special. I said to her, these are amazing, you're crazy if you don't try to do something with them.

**CTCL: So you encouraged her?  
** DJA: Of course I did, I mean, if you're a music fan, and you heard songs like that, wouldn't you want to get them out there for people to hear?

**CTCL: But you were trying to get Metropolis off the ground at the same time. You weren't competitive?  
** DJA: Of course we were competitive. We're musicians, all musicians have a bit of an ego, even me. (laughs) But we were actually fans of each others' work first, before we became lovers. I think that's quite important. That we were in love with each other, but we were also in love with each other's talents. We believed in one another. I still do; I still believe she's the most talented musician and songwriter I've ever known. It didn't feel like we were in competition... well, not like it was with the other Ludlow Street bands. We wanted each other to succeed, and the other partner's success was like a little spur, a little incentive to work harder, do better, push ourselves further with our music.

**CTCL: Was it a supportive relationship, then?  
** DJA: I think it was the relationship that both of us needed, even when it sometimes meant being a bit honest with one another. It was good that we trusted one another enough to be able to have that kind of honesty between us. I didn't always like it at the time, but I recognised it was good for me. So yeah, I found it supportive. I guess she must have, too, or she wouldn't have put up with me for so long. (Laughs)

**CTCL: Was it hard, working together and being in a relationship?  
** DJA: No. Oddly, it wasn't, not for me. Maybe Merry would say something different, I don't know. Everyone said it was going to mess up our relationship, working together, but it didn't. I think, to be completely honest, it made our relationship stronger when we actually worked together, that we felt like we were on the same team, and pulling in the same direction. We were best when we felt like we had some project we were working on together. It was only when we went off and did different things that the other one wasn't involved with, that we got into trouble.

**CTCL: Was that actually what destroyed your relationship? The pressures of being in two different bands on two different continents?**

 

I almost stopped the interview right there, feeling my head spinning, my heart pounding in my chest. But slowly, I brought myself back to the apartment, the big, picture windows. The warmth of the cup of coffee in my hand. The smoothness of the worn wooden floor beneath my bare feet. Her name, faded, but still there on my second toe.

 

**CTCL: Are you still there? I'm sorry, that was possibly a bit too personal. Let's change the subject...  
** DJA: No.

**CTCL: I apologise. Look, let's talk about...  
** DJA: No, no, no, it's fine. I need to answer that. I need to get that out there. It was not actually the pressure of being in two bands that broke us up. We'd been together for a long time, we'd learned how to negotiate the perils of the two-band relationship. We had that _down_ , at least, I thought. We had got good at being independent, but making time for one another. In the end, it was me that fucked up the relationship. I broke us up. I did it. It was 100% me.

 

There was a shocked silence on the other end of the phone, as I realised that I'd never actually confessed that before. I'd always tried to put the blame somewhere else: Feminism, Dolores and Cindy, the abortion, Merry's evasion and dissembling, her not telling me about her choice. But as I said it, I realised it was true. At the other end of the line, I could hear the young woman scrambling for another question, and kinda felt sorry for her. Dieter might enjoy this, wrong-footing a journalist, but I felt like a cad.

 

**CTCL: Look, this doesn't have to be on the record, but what was it? Infidelity?  
** DJA: No. In an awful way, it might have been easier if it had, because that we could have talked about, could have got out in the light of day, got over it, even if it still broke us up. We'd dealt with... jealousy, and stuff like that before, and we got past it, with talking our way through it. It would have been easier if she'd just fallen in love with someone else, or if I had. But we didn't. It's weird, how I always had a bit of a jealous streak, but it was all just my insecurity. Infidelity was never actually a problem for us, even though that was the number one thing I obsessed over. Like, we talked about it, before either of us ever went on tour, what was OK, and what was not OK, so we knew our boundaries, and we... well, I think because we trusted one another, the situations we were afraid of, they never came up. Merry and I, we are both, despite what we do for a living, very shy, very introverted, very private people. We're both creatures of habit, and our habit was each other. It's funny how you think that being in a band - especially a band like Metropolis - must be this non-stop hedonistic party, of sex and groupies and people throwing themselves at you. When you're in a band with guys like Dieter and Doyle... y'know...

**CTCL: Metropolis do have a reputation for being, well, ladies' men. You guys are always being photographed with supermodels.  
** DJA: (laughs) I like ladies, we all like ladies. Women are the greatest. If you had a choice between hanging out with four sweaty, swearing blokes, or a group of women who look beautiful, smell nice, and flatter you with their attention, who are you going to choose? OK, you're right about the supermodels, but I actually only know a lot of women who are models, because my sister worked in the fashion industry. They're just my sister's friends.

**CTCL: That must be convenient.  
** DJA: Not really. I'd get in so much trouble if I dated one of my sister's friends and it worked out badly! And I'm... well, I'm really bad at dating. It's hard, for me, to become intimate with someone. Maybe it's a musician thing, I dunno, because Merry is the same way. When you live in your own head as much as we do, it's hard to let someone else in. I have to really be in love, in all the way, sharing the insides of our heads, to be in a relationship. And I have only been in love once in my life, and that was with Merry Wythenshawe.

**CTCL: Do you still talk, do you still keep in contact? She gave me the impression that you didn't, though she didn't want to talk about. Like I said, we don't have to talk about it if this is painful or intrusive, but...  
** DJA: No, we don't. And that is, also 100% my fault. I fucked up. You're right, and Merry's right. I'm not going to talk about what happened, if it's painful or intrusive to her. But I just want it in writing, that it was my fault. I fucked up. I know life doesn't come with a do-over button, and you cannot just go back and make something not have happened, and you can never go back and put something right. But the one thing I can do, is own it. I fucked up. It was my fault. I should have been there, and I wasn't. I should have stayed and talked things through, and I didn't. I was too selfish, too caught up in my own band, and my own shit. I did this to us, not her. No matter what part of this interview you use or don't use, and I trust you to use your judgement, and not hurt Merry, but please, just make sure you put that down, in writing. The break-up was my fault.

 

I stuttered my way through the rest of the interview, confirming or denying rumours, facts and figures, sharing my memories or giving my opinion on various bits of ancient history about Deltawave and Windlass that I thought everyone else had forgotten. At the end, I just felt drained, washed out and exhausted, and collapsed into bed. I cried a bit - OK, I cried a lot - great heaving sobs, like some kind of heavy emotion was passing through me and out of me. Then I lay down and slept. Me, the chronic insomniac, I lay down clutching my pillow between my arms, and I slept for most of the afternoon, and all of the night.

And when I awoke, early the next morning, I felt washed clean. I'm not going to be dramatic, and say that I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders or anything, but for the first time, I felt like it really was over, between Merry and me, and that I was OK with it. It was time to move on.

About a month later, after the magazine came out, there was an email - not from Merry, but from Cindy Birdweather. In a way, I was glad. I don't think I could have handled an email from Merry; that would have just opened up the wounds all over again. But Cindy was OK, I was used to Cindy, had got used to her being around as 'Dieter's partner' as much as 'Merry's manager'. I could deal with an email from Cindy.

'We've had the CTCL piece over here. That was a brave thing to do, Dan. I really do not think it would be a good idea for you two to start communicating again, but I wanted to let you know that she did read it, and she did appreciate it. I hope that brings you some comfort and some healing.'

I wrote back a brief note saying thanks for the email, and I appreciated the sentiment. But I agreed, that the past was the past, and we should all leave it there. I wished all of them the best, but it was better if we all left one another alone. And I stuck to it. There was no reply, and I didn't email Cindy again. That chapter of my life was over.


	44. There's A Ghost In My House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slowly, painfully, with Branwell's and Doyle's help, Daniel learns how to date again, and tries to negotiate the hinterlands of a new relationship while sober. But he is a haunted man, and he still very much suffers from _ghosts_.
> 
> After two years of solo projects, can he reassemble Metropolis to start work on their fourth album?

Eventually, I met a pretty girl, at the Lacuna Lounge, one evening I had gone there with Branwell to nurse a tonic water while watching Foucault 45 do a pretty decent impression of My Bloody Valentine. I noticed her right away - standing in the serious-music-fans spot right in front of the sound booth, elbows resting on the wooden ledge, hips tipped slightly forward, head cocked like she was listening intently - and I almost never noticed women any more. She wasn't even dressed up, just wearing a pair of casual bootlegged jeans and a Sister-era Sonic Youth T-shirt that looked like it had been around since 1987, but she still looked like the most effortlessly elegant woman in the joint, with her shoulder-length dark hair cut in a perfectly mussed punky bob, and black mascara smeared around her smokey dark-grey eyes. Branwell walked right up to her and greeted her like an old friend, even as I hung back slightly shyly, slightly intimidated by her rock-chick looks. Elizabeth, to my surprise, wasn't a musician, but she did work for a record company, doing Back Catalogue for one of DGI's other subsidiary labels.

She was pretty cool with me at first, perhaps even cold when Branwell introduced us, casually declining my offer of a drink. "C'mon, let me buy you a drink," I pressed, talking too fast, like I always did when I was nervous. "It's one of the few perks of being rich, getting to treat people. I used to work at DGI, I know how poorly they pay support staff. Let me get the rounds in."

That had been completely the wrong thing to say, as she casually blew me out of the water. "You're right. I work at a record label. So I meet a lot of rock stars on power trips, and a lot of wealthy guys who think they can just buy whatever - or whoever - they like. And I'm sorry but I don't play that game. So no thank you." I stared at her, totally taken aback. Like, maybe I had gotten entirely too used to women drawn like moths to my celebrity, and perhaps I was more than slightly intrigued by a woman with the guts to knock me back.

"Hey, come on." It was to my slight relief that Branwell actually leapt to my defence. "I have known this guy a long time. He's in my baseball league, he's in a band with my brother, and trust me, he is the least _rock star_ guy you are ever going to meet. He's OK. He's pretty sound."

"Look, I know what band you're in," Elizabeth shot back, eyeballing me suspiciously. "And I know the reputation Metropolis have. Playboys."

"Playboy? Asheton?" Branwell scoffed. "I love this dude, seriously, but he is _pathetic_ with women. Did you know, he has had precisely one date since he split with his fiancee last year?"

"Branwell," I warned, feeling my face flushing. Weren't my friends supposed to be on my side, when it came to meeting women?

"I mean, Doyle, Dieter, those guys, sure. They're sluts. All the girls in my band say so. But Daniel here - did you know this guy didn't even have a proper girlfriend until he was 24?" Branwell laughed, his face flushed with beer - beer I had bought him, come to think of it - and I made a mental note to never, ever make any more confidences to him over post-baseball smoothies.

"Branwell, that's enough!" I snapped, feeling the blush spread right around to the back of my neck. But this woman - this seriously attractive woman from a DGI subsidiary - she was looking at me in a slightly new light.

"24?" she asked, slightly disbelievingly. I mean, there was nothing I could say. I didn't even try to deny it, I just shrugged semi-apologetically, palms up, and prepared to slink away, crushed. "Nah, you know it's alright. Some people are just late-bloomers, it's OK."

"I wasn't a late bloomer, I just had... I dunno, other things on my mind. More important things, to an isolated kid from an all-boys high school."

"Like _what_?" she asked, her well-shaped eyebrows arching quizzically.

"Music, alright? I was totally obsessed with music as a teenager. Indie-Rock was my girlfriend, in high school. I spent all of my money on it, all of my time on it, buying records, trying to sneak into gigs downtown..."

Now I had piqued her interest as she flicked her hair out of her eyes. "So what was your first show?"

I grinned. This was always one of my favourite interview questions. "You are not going to believe this, but The Curse, at the Old Ritz, in 1985. It was just after _A Door Is A Jar_ had dropped, but the gig was booked before they really blew up. It was a total madhouse. Six months later, they were playing Madison Square Garden. Someone outside offered me, like, two hundred bucks for my ticket - an unimaginable fortune in those days - but I hung onto it... and they were amazing. It was one of the best gigs of my life."

"No way," she protested. "You must have been about 10!"

"13," I corrected proudly, growing more animated as I relived happy memories. "It was a 14 and over show. I barely got in. There was such a crush in the crowd, and I have always been small for my age. But because I was so short, I managed to dodge between people and get right up front. So then they played _Inside You_ , and during the initial keyboard solo, Simon Fillup came right up in front of the monitors and stood in front of me as he..."

"Oh my god, I remember that. He went right up front, and he shook up a bottle of champagne, and sprayed it all over the crowd. It _stank_ , but I didn't want to wash my hair for a week, because of the memory of that show!"

"You were _there_?" It was my turn to be impressed.

"It was my second ever gig. I'd seen Mexican Summers a few weeks earlier."

"You saw Mexican Summers on the Wedding Cake Blues tour?" I gasped. "How the hell did you get in?"

"Fake ID," she shrugged. "I was an early bloomer. I looked 18 from the time I was 12."

"I had to wait until '87 to see them."

"CBGBs? The all-ages show? That show was such a trip!" Elizabeth's eyes had lit up with genuine pleasure now. "Remember when Kramer from Bongwater got onstage with them, and he kept pouring kerosene on Jeanette's cymbals and lighting them on fire..."

"Oh my god, yes! That was one of the most memorable nights of my life. What a trip... and who would ever have guessed, that a decade later, my band would be supporting them on our first ever European Tour. That was the greatest honour of my life, probably, sharing a shitty broken-down tourbus with Jorge and Jeanette. Seriously, I think that was the first moment I ever thought... this is it. We've made it. I can die happy now, my teenage dreams fulfilled."

Elizabeth laughed. She even had a cute laugh, like the tinkling of little bells. And I felt suddenly very, very relaxed with her. "You know what... Daniel, was it? Maybe I will let you buy me that drink."

I bought her watered-down white wine spritzers because she said she had to drive, while I stuck to tonic water, and she didn't even seem to mind. She and I sat in the front booth until the Lacuna closed, talking about new bands, and old bands, and what gigs we'd been to over the years, especially back during the early 90s. We discovered that we had been at many of the same shows, especially at Maxwell's and The Kitchen and the old Knitting Factory, back when it was still in an actual converted Knitting Factory on Houston, with ugly knitwear pinned all over the ceiling. She'd been at some of the most memorable gigs of my life - The Nothings at CBGBs in '87, Hüsker Dü at Maxwells in '88 - both of us having snuck in while underage. And when the bar closed, I surprised both of us by asking for her phone number.

We quickly started dating, or at least 'going on dates'. She took me out to gigs, mostly, but she headed east, dragging me out to venues I'd never heard of, out in the newly gentrifying areas of Williamsburg and Bushwick. She had the same nose-to-the-ground attitude in search of new music that I had once had, and I enjoyed being pushed out of my comfort zone and challenged with musical styles that completely confused me. Unlike the Lower East Side and the weight of its RAWK history, Brooklyn was a seething cauldron of musical genres, hip-hop and electronic music and hippie jam bands all colliding and mutating into new and exciting mixes. And Elizabeth impressed me by being able to distinguish between every single new microgenre. She made me mixtapes, though, granted, they were on MP3 now. And I came to rely on her for what gigs to go to and what bands' MP3s to buy on iTunes.

I'll be honest; I didn't feel _passion_ with her. I didn't feel that stomach-churning, spine-tingling sense of panic, like I was going to throw up I was so nervous, that I'd felt the first night I met Merry. And to be honest, I was relieved to be past that kid-stuff, another thing I'd left behind with all-night binge drinking and driving to gigs in the back of broken-down old vans. But what I felt, with Elizabeth, was _comfortable_. I felt like we fit together, like I trusted her implicitly. Like every conversation I had with her was like catching up with an old friend.

She got along, with my friends, which was super-important, and everyone seemed to like her. In fact, to my surprise she was a regular at Doyle's bar. Doyle had a special deal on Tuesday nights, to pack the place out on the slowest night of the week - Rolling Rock for a buck, a free slice of pizza for everyone, and he'd let some crappy local band set up and basically rehearse in public in exchange for free beer. I wasn't interested in the beer, but free food and live music all evening without a cover charge, that was something that still hooked me, even now I was supposedly a millionaire. Elizabeth and I had been going out regularly for several weeks now, so I thought it was perhaps time to introduce her to my friends, see what she made of them. So we made our way over early doors, to be sure of getting a seat and a meal, and ducked in through the back entrance while the band loaded in.

Doyle greeted Elizabeth warmly as we entered, coming to the front of the bar and throwing his arms around her neck to embrace her. "Lizzie!" he bellowed, but then he stepped back when he caught sight of me. "No... no way."

"I told you, you knew the new guy I was seeing."

"Daniel," sighed Doyle, though I couldn't really tell if he was actually defeated, or just playing. He looked like he was just playing, because he was grinning over the top of the chunky glasses he had to wear when he was trying to work the bar's decrepit cash register. "Your hot new date is... Daniel. _Our_ Daniel."

Elizabeth just shrugged, looking sideways at me from under long, mascara darkened eyelashes. "He's funny, and charming in a self-depreciating kind of way. I like him."

"Six months, I tried chasing this chick," Doyle drawled, as Elizabeth rolled her eyes. "She wouldn't give me the time of day. Now she's dating _Daniel_?"

I somehow shrugged and blushed all at the same time as I settled into a barstool and claimed a slice of pizza, casting my eye over the rag-tag set of equipment currently sprawled over the cramped space between the bathrooms and the rear exit, where the bands usually played. "So who are tonight's musical losers?" I asked, hoping to change the subject from my pathetic love life.

"No, no, these guys are pretty good," Doyle insisted. "I swear to god. This time, I swear, they're alright."

"The bands are always terrible, that's part of the entertainment," Elizabeth whispered quickly in my ear.

"I know, I know," I laughed, then looked over at Doyle, trying simultaneously to light a cigarette and pour a pitcher of Rolling Rock. There were all kinds of rumours that Juliani was trying to bring in a smoking ban, but Doyle had sworn that he would carry on smoking in his own damn bar even if he had to barricade himself inside it. "What are they called?"

"I dunno, I forget," shrugged Doyle through a mouthful of cigarette. Approaching the other end of the bar, nearest the pile of amps, he plonked the pitcher down in front of a chubby boy with a forelock of greasy blond hair as intractable as an Icelandic pony's. "What are you guys called again, kid?"

The chubby blond kid shifted nervously from foot to foot like a shy horse, looking like he wanted nothing more than to bolt and get the hell out of there with his beer. He didn't even look old enough to be in the bar, but then again, since I'd turned 30, support bands and policemen seemed to be getting younger by the minute. He mumbled something unintelligible - was that a faint accent? - and peered at us suspiciously from under that thick blond mane. As he turned towards me, I realised he had a lazy eye and a face full of spots, like a constellation across his chin and cheeks. Poor kid. No musician was ever going to make it with a face like the reheated pizza Doyle served.

"What was that? I didn't catch it."

"We're called Las Armas," he mumbled, so shy he seemed to fight to get the words out, trying to work out how quickly he could just seize the pitcher and make a run for it back to the safety of his gear and his drummer. "This week, at least. Our guitarist keeps changing it."

"That's a terrible name," said Doyle, with a wink in my direction. "Worse than Kiss You In Paris."

"I know," said the chubby blond kid with a vague shrug. "We're gonna change it soon - again - I think. Let me know if you have any ideas..."

Abruptly, there was a altercation at the door, though the bar was not yet officially open. "Remove your filthy hands from me, immediately, you philistine. I am an artist, you _peasant_ , and I have an important engagement for a performance this evening, in this very establishment," boomed a very arrogant, very irate voice. I turned to see a tall, thin young man in a slightly sinister black nazi-looking military get-up slouching across the floor.

"You are fucking kidding me," I said, exchanging disbelieving glances with Elizabeth as the new kid made a beeline for the bass cabinet. "This is the fashion now? What the fuck did Dieter start?"

"It's clearly a compliment, guys," Elizabeth laughed. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

As the boy in the Nazi gear turned around, revealing a set of impeccable cheekbones and an asymmetrical black haircut, ironed bone straight, I nearly burst out laughing. "Well, I can see the appeal of this band to you, Doyle," I teased.

"No, they're good," Doyle persisted, trying to light another cigarette off the butt of his last. "You might remember their guitarist... he was a couple of years below us at NYU?" The tall lad picked up his bass, slung it down low, around his knees, like Peter Book, and started to thumb out a Dead Letters bassline. The pizza-faced blond kid fiddling with the microphone stand - the singer, I guess? - turned around and glared daggers at him. 

Noticing a lull in the conversation, Elizabeth picked it up. "Oh god, you went to NYU, as well?" she sighed, rolling her eyes. "Why didn't you warn me? I went to SVA; you guys were our mortal enemies."

"I got nothing against SVA," I protested. "My sister went to SVA. You might have known her... Pris Asheton?"

Elizabeth burst out laughing. "Oh my god. She was in my class! Pris Asheton? I am dating Pris Asheton's hopeless little brother?"

"Why do girls always say that?" I moaned, though I realised I better not mention the Karen Litchen thing to Doyle.

"Hey, I might even have gone to see you guys with Pris... did your band ever play The Spiral?" It was hard to work out if she was teasing, because her default expression seemed to be an arch poker-face of vague amusement.

Doyle burst out laughing. "Oh my god, yes. We played the Spiral. The Spiral, The Pyramid Club, The Lacuna, every goddamn toilet venue on the Lower East Side. So I consider it my duty in life to make sure my toilet venue treats unsigned bands a little better than that."  He made his way over to serve a glass of beer to the nazi bass-player. Oh no, this lad would not make do with the free Rolling Rock; he wanted a Black and Tan, and they were now arguing over whether Doyle was going to make him pay for it or not. Of course Doyle let him have it for free; he was a pushover with the young bands that played his bar, like I don't know how he ever made a profit.

But really, as I watched the group set up, I felt kinda nostalgic for the days of playing shitty dive bars on the Lower East Side. There had been a kind of purity to that hunger. I had never realised it at the time, caught up in local scene politics, how much simpler music was back then, when I did not have to check every guitar chord, every photo shoot, every haircut, every dodgy 70s porn star moustache with a team of managers and A&R people and PR crew. The chubby blond and the Dieter wannabe were now arguing over choice of tipple, as the pony-haired kid seemed less than satisfied with having a pitcher of Rolling Rock all to himself now that the bass player had something more special. Those really were the days, when band arguments were over nothing more complicated than who got all the drink tickets.

"Did you ever play Nightingale's?" asked Elizabeth, pulling me back to the present.

"Holy shit, yeah, we played Nightingale's," I laughed, pulling a tray of fresher pizza slices towards us. "We played every fucking dump on Manhattan, I swear to god."

"Was the guy from the Spin Doctors there?"

I burst out laughing. "Yeah, he was always there. I swear to god, he went to every single gig at that place. He was always down the front, usually dancing in that goofy kinda way, like hot damn, dude, you have had how many top ten records, and your idea of a good time is still watching shitty unsigned bands at a local dive bar?"

"Hey!" protested Doyle, jerking the tray of pizza slices back.

"I didn't mean you," I protested, pulling an innocent face, but then I grew serious again. "But sheeeeit, I mean, that's the thing. How do you go back to a normal life again, after the top ten records stop coming? Do you just pretend like nothing has changed, going to gigs, like.. _hey, isn't that the guy that used to be in Metropolis_?"

Almost in confirmation of my words, at that moment, a voice spoke at my elbow. "Excuse me, I don't mean to trouble you, or interrupt if you're out with your friends, but I was just wondering... aren' t you the guitarist from Metropolis?" I rolled my eyes at Elizabeth, then nodded as I turned, to see this speech had been delivered at speed by a small, skinny kid with a crooked nose, an unruly mop of curly light-brown hair, and a hungry look in his eyes that almost shocked me, with its familiarity. "I think we may have met before, Mr Asheton... at a CMJ workshop a couple of years ago? Oh, I wasn't in one of the bands, I was working for the label. I was doing press for Domino? You probably don't remember, but... Anyway. Can I interest you in a demo tape? See, we're playing here later tonight, and given how much I respect you, and I trust your vastly superior knowledge of the music industry, I'd be really interested in hearing what you think of us..."

"Thanks," I stuttered, feeling like I had just been visited by the ghost of schmoozes past. This guy - just a boy really, in an ill-fitting charity shop suit that had been pinned and darted to fit his tiny frame - seemed at the same time, both shockingly naive and completely smooth at his music-biz patter. "I'll check it out."

"Hot damn, I appreciate it, man," said the boy, leaning forward and clasping me gently on the elbow in that smooth personal-touch move I'd once learned from Bebe Newcolm. "I gotta go soundcheck, but I'll catch up with you later, kay?"

"No problemo," I said to the retreating back of my own youth, feeling both overwhelming nostalgic, and somehow oddly put out as I slipped the demo back behind the bar for safekeeping (or perhaps forgetting if the band turned out to be shit).

Behind the bar, Doyle was cackling like a sick duck. "If you could see your face right now, old man."

"These kids," I sputtered. "These young kids! I mean, on one level... Good luck to them. But on another... hot damn, holy fucking shit, like, you know how I was saying about how herd-like the NYC music scene is, and Metropolis and Stakes clones are like a dime a dozen now, but _this_... hot damn, this is just taking the fucking piss... Like, should I call my lawyer, and say... this young kid's stole not just my look but my whole fucking _schtick_?"

"Dan!" someone called, and my head snapped around, as I realised that pony-boy was not addressing me, he was addressing the newcomer. "Where the fuck have you been?"

"Punctuality is an admirable trait, but it is hardly endemic to the milieu of the jobbing musician..." drawled the Dieter clone, wiping a smudge of mascara from the edge of his cheekbone.

"You keep using that word. _Endemic_. Do you even know what the fuck it means?" said Pony-Boy, turning back to snap at the irritating bassist.

"You _don't_?" The Dieter clone looked almost triumphant.

"Guys, guys, I am so so super-sorry, but I had an important and unavoidable phone call with my boss in London," hustled my spooky doppelganger, twitching his shoulders nervously as he attempted an apologetic shrug. "Hot damn, I cannot impress upon you guys enough, the crucial super-importance of maintaining good links within the music industry on both sides of the Atlantic, if our band is to ever get anywhere..."

As Doyle giggled at my obvious discomfort, I sputtered aloud. "Was I ever that bad?"

"You were way worse."

"No, I wasn't." I felt genuinely torn, watching them, between wanting to take them under my wing and advise them, tell them what mistakes not to make, what methods to pursue, and what compromises to avoid making - and wanting to turn that young boy over my knee and spank him.

"Admit it, old man; they're us, ten years ago," Doyle said, all misty eyed, with nostalgia. But then, he started to recite, in a sing-song voice "We're losing our edge, we're losing our edge... All these young kids coming up behind us... we're losing our edge!" He shuffled over to the pile of junk that comprised the bar's PA and sound system, and turned it on, flipping to a CD to test out the speakers. A whine of feedback was shortly followed by the tinny thump of LCD Soundsystem's drum machine as James Murphy's voice started booming out through the bar. We were losing our edge. The fashions had changed again, if these kids were anything to go by. Everybody was selling their turntables and buying guitars again. "How many mics you guys gonna need?"

"Two," called out the diminutive, curly-haired guitarist.

"Three," contradicted the bassist in the nazi outfit, and I found myself laughing without really knowing why.

"You guys gonna want a light show?" offered Doyle, teasingly picking up a large industrial flashlight and sweeping its beam across the makeshift stage. Pony-Boy squinted, and held up his hand to block the glare. "Only the best for my bands, at Doyle's Bar and Pizza Grill!"

"Has he always been this annoying?" said Elizabeth quietly, with a conspiratorial tone.

"You know what? This is actually Doyle in a good mood. And I'm hella relieved to see him happy again."

Elizabeth smiled vaguely, like she was trying to work me out. "You really care about him, don't you?"

I glanced back towards the stage area, where the besuited guitarist was trying to press gang the other two into tuning their guitars with a battered tuning pedal. "We're like brothers. We only squabble because it means we really care about each other."

LCD Soundsystem finally stuttered to a close, as Doyle got the microphones set up, and the band started to line-check. The song started with the bass, the Dieter clone spreading his legs wide as he walked up to the edge of the make-shift stage, bending over to pick out a complicated, octave-hopping bassline. Fucking bassists. Show-offs, the lot of them. But as the chubby, pizza-faced kid stepped up the mic and started to sing, a shiver went down my spine. The guitarist joined in, stroking his guitar gently to provoke atmospheric sheets of reverb, as the drums slowly rumbled to life. That kid, that chubby kid in a schoolboy's clothes, with his greasy blond forelock and a face like a slice of pepperoni, he had the voice of a fucking angel, a deep and low and rich baritone that made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. " _I wish I could live free, hope it's not beyond me, settling down, it takes time..._ "

"Holy shit," I observed, softly, to Elizabeth, glad that there was someone with me whose ears had similarly perked up and snapped to attention as the band had started to play.

"I told you they were good," smirked Doyle, on his way to tell the doorman to unlock and open up.

"Do you want to dance?" asked Elizabeth, leaning forward as the bar quickly started to fill up with punters, drawn by the free food and the enchanting melodies spilling out into the night.

I grinned, feeling my spirits lifting, having everything I really needed in life again - friends, good music, and a beautiful woman who wanted to dance with me. "I would love to dance."

Christ, I had missed dancing, probably most of all. I had missed chucking my body about to low-down, dirty rock music in a dive bar. I had missed feeling a woman's body responding both to the movements of my own, and to the music we shared. Feeling a bit loosened by the pounding, animalistic beat, I risked draping my arms around Elizabeth's waist - respectfully loose, of course - as the band took a slow song, and the stately elegiac tone of the boyish singer's voice rendered him somehow beautiful. " _I'm sick of spending these lonely nights, training myself not to care_..." he crooned, eyes shut, as all the weight of the dank, depressing, slowly gentrifying city lifted off my shoulders, floating up to the ceiling to join the christmas-tree lights that Doyle had just flicked on.

Elizabeth looked into my eyes, and I smiled at her, feeling for a moment perfectly happy, before noticing that her own face was serious, maybe even worried. "What is it? What's the matter?" I asked.

She shook her hair out of her face, but the worried expression did not disappear. "Daniel, do you actually _like_ me?"

"I like you fine," I assured her. In fact, buoyed by the warm, sexy throb of the music, I added, "I like you rather a lot, actually."

"Because we have been _dating_ for a couple of weeks now, and you have not even tried to kiss me." I noted the way she emphasised the word, realising that every time she had said it, it had been a question, rather than a statement.

I blushed, flustered, and looked down at her soft, plump lips, hovering about a foot away from mine in the half-dark. Handling this sober was not going to be easy. "Would you _like_ me to kiss you? Is that what you're trying to say?"

"Oh, come here, you idiot," Elizabeth laughed softly, put her hand on the back of my neck and pulled me towards her. _Kissing_ , I thought as her lips met mine. Wow, I had missed kissing maybe even more than dancing. But then, spreading slowly across me like a chill, kissing started to feel weird. She had closed the gap between our bodies, and started to press her body against mine, and I noticed awkwardly that she was almost exactly the same height as me. Kissing someone the same size as me, well, that was a little bit weird. I was used to kissing a girl who was about two and a half inches taller than me in her bare feet, and straining my whole body upwards towards her, like a sunflower climbing towards the light, well, that was, for me, an inherent part of the physical joy of kissing. Kissing _Merry_ , at least.

Oh Christ, the minute I thought of her name, kissing no longer felt like a good thing to be doing, and I broke off, semi-awkwardly. Maybe dancing had been OK, but kissing was still a little bit too soon.

"Are _you_ OK?" she asked, her voice unusually soft.

"I'm fine," I lied.

"I feel like there's a ghost in the room," she whispered, and it was such an odd thing to say, but at the same time, yeah. I understood exactly what she meant.

"May be," I said, wondering how on earth to tell her that really, it wasn't her. I liked her, and yeah, I even fancied her - fancied her quite a lot, standing there with her soft breasts pressed against my chest and her hips jutting into mine. But I had ghosts, oh god, did I have ghosts. "How are you with ghosts, then?"

"Everybody's got ghosts these days. You deal," she said pragmatically, and kissed me again. Kissing her this time was better, her mouth was softer, less tongue, less demanding as she slipped gently between my lips. I pulled her tighter, feeling something stirring between my legs, something I thought I had lost for a long, long time. My hand on the small of her back felt good, so I took a risk and moved it lower, down into the pocket of her hip-hugging jeans, squeezing softly at the yielding flesh of her buttocks, oh Christ, a good, soft, round bum, what an amazing feeling that was to touch... and the gentle moan in the back of her throat as she arched her back and pressed herself against me, wow, yeah, that told me that was the right thing to have done. Kissing... yeah, kissing was an amazing thing to be doing again.

The band finished, applause erupted all around us, and I realised suddenly as I opened my eyes that she had backed me up against a wall. The spotty-faced singer thanked the audience, and the guitarist waved and nodded like an overexcited puppy, and I wondered how long we'd been dancing - hell, I wondered how long we'd been kissing. I smiled at Elizabeth, but my mind was racing. I should find Doyle, try to get that demo tape back that I'd diplomatically left behind the bar. I should find that kid with the curly hair and the ill-fitting suit and tell him... tell him what? 'Your band are really something, I thought you were cheap Metropolis rip-offs because of your costumes, but really, man, you do have something totally special, totally amazing - though for gods sake, boy, sort out your hair with some styling gel and get a tailor to do something about that floppy suit...'

But the girl in my arms was trying to get my attention. "Look, I only live two blocks away. Do you want to go back to mine and listen to some records, all those shitty old punk bands we used to love, back in the 80s?"

I looked at her carefully under the dim lights of the packed bar, knowing full well that I was being invited to do something considerably more intimate than just reminisce over some old Sonic Youth albums. And thought, actually, yes, I could totally sleep with this woman. I liked her; I trusted her. But then I asked, "If I sleep with you, will that make you my girlfriend?"

"I don't know about that," she answered, rather too honestly. "You kinda don't seem like you want a girlfriend at the moment. And I don't know that I'm into _casual sex_."

I thought about it for a minute, staring at the way her plump lips turned up at the corners, folding her cheeks into dimples. She wasn't blonde, and she had dark, greyish eyes instead of sea green, but I was a sucker for dimples. "You know, I think I might actually be ready to start thinking about having a girlfriend again."

"OK," she agreed. "Do you want to come back to mine, and see how it goes?"

It went well. I went back to her apartment (and I was relieved it was to be at her apartment, because my loft still held too many memories of Merry) and we listened to Sonic Youth and Black Flag and Minor Threat, and then I kissed her again, on the sofa, and kissing lead to making out, and we made out until the record finished and we were just lying there, making out to the clicking and whirring of the run-out groove. I really liked a girl who still played vinyl records, so I did not object when she took me by the hand and lead me through into her bedroom.

I was terrified. Sex, sober, for the first time in a year and a half, it was the most impossibly daunting thing. And yet her strong hands, and her beautiful body, when she stepped out of her jeans, reassured me. And Elizabeth and I had sex, tentatively, tenderly, and I held her for a little bit, stroking her hair, and then I said "Right, I guess that makes you my girlfriend now," and fell asleep.

And I went home on Wednesday morning, after she went back to work, and I picked up my guitar, and started to write a new song for the first time in a year. It wasn't a very good song, but I didn't care. It was a song, and that was what mattered. My muse was back. I would nurse these little riffs into proper songs, and when Doyle finished his solo record and did a little tour, and Dieter got back from hiking in the Tien Shan mountains, I would summon Dick back from his Texan ranch, and we would go back into the studio and write another album. I was sure of it.

For months, Elizabeth and I dated, seeing each other in the evenings and weekends, then I went back to my loft to work on my songs. She said she'd teach me to drive, sticking me behind the wheel of her old jalopy and forcing me to drive lazy circles round and round the parking lot of the huge Key Foods supermarket out in Greenpoint until I eventually got the hang of steering and parallel parking enough to acquire a permit. She coached me through my driving test, and the second time, I actually passed. I took her out to dinner to celebrate, at some hip new street food place in Williamsburg, that Doyle had once recommended. When we reached the 6-month mark, I asked her if she'd ever thought about getting married, and she said, well, she wasn't really in a hurry. There was plenty of time. I decided that wasn't entirely a no, and started dropping hints, which she politely ignored.

Doyle came back from his solo tour, flushed with the relative success of his little solo project. I didn't really understand why Doyle preferred playing little clubs to a couple hundred people to the several thousand seat arenas that Metropolis had been packing out, but Jorge Vincennes had been playing bass in his backing band, which had Doyle over the moon. Then Dieter came back from the Tien Shan, having broken his dodgy ankle yet again, and this time the black enamel walking stick with the silver deaths-head knob was not actually an affectation. Dick agreed to come up every other weekend while the cattle were still out at pasture, and work began on writing the fourth Metropolis album.

I had worried that after all that time, and all those solo projects - not to mention the unexpected success of Mountaineering - that getting back together would feel awkward, odd and pressured. But within a couple of hours, we sounded good; we sounded like a band again. Doyle had new confidence, catching my riffs and elaborating on them, the two of us weaving our guitars into a seething, bubbling sea over the top of Dick's pounding drums. I was doing more singing, too, threading backing vocals in and out of Doyle's lyrics, totally inspired by the way that Merry and Elisha used to bounce lines back and forth. Dieter could no longer stand up for a 3-hour rehearsal, so he either sat, or leaned his hip against his amp. But his bass playing was growing steadily more ambitious. Cindy had had a huge effect on him, opening his mind to funk and soul, and even 80s freestyle, and finally he was starting to write basslines as swaggering and playful as our new music required.

After all the grief and loss that had followed Mountaineering, we felt like we needed to clear out the cobwebs and let some light in. Abandoning the heaviness and intensity of Mountaineering, we decided to just have fun, and the new songs were mischievous and catchy, as I stretched my fingers into more Johnny Marr-like shapes, occasionally even recalling Talking Heads. (OK, yeah, maybe that was The Racists' fault.) I went digging for Speaking In Tongues and Fear of Music, for inspiration, only to realise that they had been Merry's albums. I didn't dare go down to the basement lock-up to find them, so instead I borrowed them off Elizabeth.

Once the album was written, I started harassing MVC to approve studio time. That, however, was a massive hassle. I didn't understand what was going on at MVC; after all Mountaineering had been rather more than a moderate success. True, we weren't quite Radioshack level yet, but we had certainly outsold Slur's last record. Taylor had made a point of telling me that, and I felt a slight burst of pride for outplaying my supposed former rival. But still, we couldn't quite seem to get anyone to sign off on any kind of schedule for recording the next album. None of us wanted to go back to Catskills Mansions, because without Barry, the place was just an empty room - an empty room echoing with memories of a lost friend that were still too painful to touch. We decided, unanimously, to try somewhere else, but with no word from MVC, we had no idea where to go.

Taylor had always dealt with Keith at MVC, but Keith had left about six months earlier. Keith's replacement was supposed to have been Toby, but Toby had moved from A&R to Marketing and said that he couldn't help. Toby put us through to Susan in A&R, but Susan wasn't sure she had the appropriate seniority to approve recording sessions, and besides, she was leaving herself, in another 6 weeks, recruited by Windlass Records. Frustrated by the lack of response, Taylor and I flew out to LA and went into the office in person to try and find someone, anyone, in A&R, who could sign off a purchase order for the recording of the next album.

But the distinctive MVC building in LA was half empty when we arrived, and those staff that remained were demoralised and confused. Susan agreed to speak to us, though not on the record, and told us what had happened. Shareholder revolt. The 'markets' ruled everything now. The venerable company had failed to anticipate the revolutions of the web, and had not yet managed to negotiate a deal with the massively expanding up and coming web retailer, iTunes. This meant they were floundering, their Digital Rights Management was a mess, they were losing money hand over fist and the sharks were circling. 'Fuck the internet, let's sell a million records!' the ancient dinosaurs on the Board of Directors had said, as if they didn't even understand what was happening to them. There was a rumour going round the office that the whole company was on the verge of being sold to Sony. Sony Records, who had turned up their noses at Metropolis because of Dieter's AIDS rumours. I had no intention of ever ending up on Sony Records. So I looked in my address book, and wrote down a phone number for Susan.

"That's the home phone number of Bebe Newcolm. Tell her you're a friend of mine, she will remember me. And tell her that if she wants to sign an incredibly hot property, Metropolis is currently going cheap, and we want to come home. You are going to make sure that MVC drop us, before you leave, and get Windlass to pick us up. Please let that be the last deal you approve before you leave MVC, and the first you bring on board at Windlass."

"I don't know that I have the authority to approve that..." Susan stuttered, though I noted she picked up the business card sharpish and turned it over and over in her hands, staring at the phone number in biro on the back.

"I think you do, Susan, and even if you don't, if it's as chaotic around here as you say, no one will notice, until we are long gone. Think what kind of coup it would be, for you to bring a million-selling band like us across from MVC to Windlass."

I could see in her eyes that she was torn. There was a part of her that was hugely tempted, but the fear shone through. Come on; if Windlass had hired her, she had to have some guts somewhere. It was an awful feeling, knowing that the fate of my band was in the hands of some woman I didn't even know if I could trust. But I had done the best I could; it was up to Susan whether to grab the chance I had dangled in front of her, or not.

"Well, that was a complete waste of time," I muttered to Taylor as we left the building.

"Not a complete waste of time," Taylor pointed out. "If you put her in touch with Bebe Newcolm... Who knows what might happen. But anyway. Come on, we're in LA. We might as well go star-spotting."

"Star-spotting," I sighed. It was the last thing I wanted to do at that moment. Really I just wanted to go back to the hotel and ring Elizabeth and tell her the gossip about the fate of the once-venerable MVC. Maybe if she played her cards right, DGI could step in and buy MVC's back catalogue at a bargain basement discount.

"Come on, Daniel. Film stars!" Taylor urged. "I thought you were really into movies."

"I'm into movies, but I'm into French New Wave cinema, not... Hollywood crap."

But still, I found myself strong-armed into driving over to Beverley Hills, and following Taylor as she walked up and down from one overpriced boutique to the next, trying to pretend I didn't know her as she gawked at strange women who might vaguely resemble some actress who had once played a supporting role in a Julia Roberts vehicle. We paused outside the massive Firbank shop, and I felt myself overwhelmed by nostalgia. The models in the windows were new, other classy blondes that only vaguely resembled Merry, but still, I felt a certain weight of trepidation at entering. Indeed, inside, there were still displays from older ad campaigns, with photos of Merry that made me rather uncomfortable, even two years later. Really, I just wanted to leave, but Taylor had insisted that she had caught sight of a genuine celebrity, a Colm someone-or-other, an Irish actor who had successfully made the jump from indie Brit-films to Hollywood. As she went stalking after him with her mobile in hand to take a photo, I looked around, and stared straight into a familiar face.

Oh god, no, it was another photo of Merry, this one with a bobbed 1920s haircut that looked really quite fetching on her, and I found myself staring at the photo with open nostalgia, gazing into her eyes with apologetic regret for all the things I hadn't said, and all the things I wished I had never said. "I am so sorry," I mouthed at the photo, feeling my heart go all fluttery.

And then the photo blinked. "Daniel," said a voice behind me, and I realised I was staring not into another life-size display photo, but a mirror.

I turned slowly, to see Merry standing behind me with a shocked expression on her face. "Merry," I said, trying unsuccessfully to keep my voice and my hands from shaking. "It's been a while."

"It has been a while. How are you? You look well." Her voice was far too even for that shocked expression, but then again, she always was a consummate professional at controlling or expressing her emotion through her voice.

"I am well... well, _now_ I am." I could do this, no really I could. It was only shock I was feeling, at seeing her so suddenly, and in LA of all places, when she was supposed to be permanently barred from entering the States.

"Oh, of course. You had some liver disease, didn't you? Are you feeling better?"

I wondered how she knew. "Yes, much better. I've quit drinking, healthy lifestyle and all that."

"Yeah, your sister said. I'm glad you're healthy now."

My sister. She still talked to my sister? Pris had never mentioned it. "How are you? Are you well? You look well. I like your new hair, it's very cute."

"Oh, I'm good," she said breezily. "I'm..."

"Miriam?" a voice rasped behind her, and she jumped slightly. "Oh, here you are. Always wandering off. You'd get lost in your own bedroom if I didn't keep an eye on you." And suddenly, the Hollywood actor appeared between a gap in clothes racks, with Taylor not too far behind. I cringed with embarrassment, but the embarrassment turned to fury as I saw the actor come up behind Merry and slap her casually on the ass before giving her a good feel, staring at me like a challenger.

"Colm, this is Daniel, an... old friend. A very old friend," she said quickly. "Daniel, this is Colm, my husband."

_Husband_. I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. Boyfriend, I had been prepared for, maybe even boy-thing or partner. Husband? Merry was married? And to this... Well, I had to admit that Colm was handsome, though he was actually about an inch shorter than me. He was devilishly handsome, in fact, with a heart-shaped Irish chin, a slightly crooked nose, hazel eyes that all the girls swooned over, and light brown hair blow-dried up off his face in a wave that gave him an extra inch or two of height. In short, I realised with a shock, Colm was, physically, a much better looking version of myself. A Hollywood handsome version of myself, the kind of man I would have picked to play myself in the movies, was anyone to make a film of Metropolis. And now this implausibly handsome actor was... married to my girlfriend? Ex-girlfriend, I had to remind myself, suddenly pulling myself back to reality, and politely extending my hand to shake the greeting I'd only just realised was extended my way. 

"Nice to meet you, Colm," I stuttered, even as Colm crushed my hand - my guitar playing hand - in his mighty paw, as if to prove a point.

But before we two men could size each other up, Merry caught sight of Taylor lurking behind us, and suddenly cried with joy. "Taylor, is that you? Oh my god!" The two girls took one look at each other and flung their arms about one another, shrieking and hugging, rocking back and forth as they commended one another on how good they looked. "This is Taylor," she explained to Colm, who was now smouldering in Taylor's direction. "We go... waaaay back. We played together in a terrible post-punk covers band, back when we were like... what was I, barely 20?"

"Oh god, don't remind me," laughed Taylor.

"Wow, that must have been a long time ago, what... 20 years ago now?" sneered Colm, a little too unsubtle to be funny, even as he grinned, like he was expecting Merry to laugh at the dig.

Indeed, I expected Merry to turn and punch him in the arm, or shoot him a dirty look, but instead, Merry just crumpled, and looked so unhappy that for a minute, I wondered what on earth I could do to make her smile again.

"Oh come on," snorted Taylor. "10, maybe 12 at the most. If I'd been managing Metropolis for two decades, I'd have fucking shot myself."

At that Merry brightened slightly. "You're still managing Metropolis? Oh, I'm so glad! They've been doing so well. You must have been so excited about all the awards that Mountaineering won. I mean... a Grammy and a Brit, come on. That's amazing. I knew it was a winner from the first time I heard the rough mixes." Even though she was speaking to Taylor, I could see her staring at me out of the corner of her eye, like she was pretending not to.

Colm glared at that, but then he saw the phone, still clutched in Taylor's hand. "Is that a camera phone? I fucking hate..."

"Oh, let's take photos, come on. For old time's sake. Here, how do you work it?" Merry took the phone from Taylor, and was about to hand it to Colm, but I took it from her.

"No, all three of you get in, I'll take it," I offered.

"No, no, come on, Daniel, you come in, too," Merry begged, but I shook my head.

"Someone has to take the picture," I shrugged, and snapped away. It gave me an excuse, at least, to stare at her, even through the viewfinder of the camera.

"Come on, let's go," grumbled Colm, suddenly tiring of this game.

"Oh, but we're staying at the Roosevelt," Taylor suddenly called after them. "Call up and ask for my room if you want to meet for drinks at some point..."

"I'd love to." Merry looked back over her shoulder, but Colm shook his head and tugged at her hand roughly, and her face fell, shooting me the most bittersweet expression I had ever seen in her beautiful eyes. And suddenly I realised that I could never really love anyone who didn't have green eyes. I had been OK, up to that moment. But the expression in those sea green eyes, it just opened up everything all over again, as if the past two years, of me getting over Merry, of me almost forgetting Merry, had just never happened. "But it wouldn't feel fair, to drink when I know that Daniel can't."

And with that, her smile winked out, and she was gone.

I was a mess as Taylor and I drove back to our hotel. I desperately wanted a drink, wanted to stop this sick dizziness in my head, wanted to make the present day go away, and just sink into my own nostalgia. But no, I didn't dare drink, not even with the dinner I pushed listlessly around my plate. Merry. Married. And not to me. How on earth could that have happened?

Come on, I told myself. Get over it. It had been two years, she was allowed to do as she pleased. I just wished I had more of an assurance that she was happy. Because, really, if she was happy with that handsome Colm dude, that was all I really asked. Clearly, I had not been the one to make her happy myself, but if someone else could... but why hadn't she looked happier? Then again, maybe that was my fault. I went through her reactions one after another. She'd been too shocked to look happy when we'd first caught sight of each other, but then surely she should have cheered up as her husband arrived? I couldn't help it. It wasn't just sexual jealousy; I didn't like the way that man spoke to her. I didn't like the way he diminished her, talked down to her, told her she was old, or foolish, or scatterbrained. If there was one thing that Merry was not, it was stupid. She was over-excitable and childlike sometimes, but she had always been sharp as a tack.

Unease nagged at the back of my mind, but I could neither dismiss it as unfounded jealousy, nor give in to it as an emotion to be indulged. I was unsettled. That was the only word for it. I could not shake the feeling that, no matter how brightly Merry smiled, something wasn't right, though I tried to shake it off and tell myself it was only jealousy.

"Come on, let's get an early night," Taylor told me as she lingered over a desert that I was unable to even help her finish. "We're flying back tomorrow."

"OK," I told her, then went to the front desk to ask if I had any messages, wondering if maybe Elizabeth had called. But as I wondered whether I should tell Elizabeth that I had seen Merry or not, the concierge handed me a slip of paper.

"Phone message for you, sir."

I stared at the paper. 'I need your help. Please. Don't ring my house, email me on FrancoiseThibault@gmail.com - Madame Thibault'

My mind suddenly wrenched back over the years to that week in Paris. There was only one person in the world who would know that joke. Merry.


	45. The Road Leads Where It's Led

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So at the last minute, I decided not to totally rip your heart out of your chest, just slightly bruise it, then hand it back to you saying, "hey, I think you might need this after all" and give you a surprise, twist happy ending.
> 
> Trigger Warning: for Domestic Violence, DV, rape, non-con, noncon, VAWG

"Excuse me, is there internet access anywhere?" I asked, and was directed to a small office with several computer terminals available to hotel guests.

I stared at the email address for several minutes, wondering what on earth Merry wanted me for, my heart swinging between trepidation and terror. But finally, I typed the address and asked 'What's going on?'

A reply pinged back a few minutes later, as I sifted through the mail I had accumulated over the past few days. There it was, that fake email address, in between messages from my sister inviting me to a BBQ, Doyle asking what was up with the record company, and Sandra wanting me to approve an eNewsletter to the fan club. 'I don't want to leave a record of this conversation. Come on SecureChat. I'll ping you.'

Merry: Are you there?  
Daniel: Is that you? Why the cloak and dagger?  
Merry: He reads my phone, my email, my text messages, everything  
Daniel: Who? Your husband?  
Merry: yes  
Daniel: should you even be talking to me, then?  
Merry: don't!  
Daniel: I'm sorry.  
Daniel: Just... seeing you today. It was a shock  
Merry: me, too  
Merry: I was not prepared for the aftermath  
Merry: I need your help!  
Daniel: what help? what do you want me to do?  
Merry: I need to leave  
Daniel: what do you need me for?  
Merry: I need you to help me  
Merry: He has my passport, my papers, everything  
Merry: I am completely dependent on him for everything, just to stay in this country  
Daniel: is that why you married him? to get a green card?  
Merry: FUCK OFF!  
Daniel: I'm sorry  
Daniel: it was a shock, I had no idea you were married  
Merry: Danny, I was a mess when you left me  
Merry: he was the first person who was kind to me  
Daniel: don't tell me this, I don't want to know, it hurts too much  
Merry: please. just listen to me?  
Daniel: OK I'm listening.  
Merry: Will you help me? I haven't much time  
Merry: Danny?  
Merry: are you still there?  
Daniel: if I can  
Daniel: no - I mean... I'll do anything for you. Still.  
Daniel: you know that. Anything you ask.  
Merry: what room number are you in?  
Daniel: 752  
Merry: wait there, I'll be there as soon as I can

 

I went back to my room and paced back and forth, wondering what on earth had made me agree. Whatever Merry was into, did I really want to get involved? But then again, I also knew that whatever she asked of me, I would just do it, whether it was in my power or not. Where the hell was she? Glancing at my watch, I wondered why it had been so long. Did it really take over an hour to get from one side of LA to the other?

After nearly two hours, there was a soft tap on the door. I had been watching TV with the sound down, but I muted the set and leapt to my feet. Surely the concierge would have called if I had a visitor? When I went to the door to look through the peephole, I was astonished to see Elizabeth standing there, wearing sunglasses, clutching a battered suitcase.

But as I swung the door open, I realised that no, Elizabeth was not that tall, and in fact it was Merry wearing a dark wig. How had I never noticed how much they resembled each other facially? Oh, Christ, that was too much. Was that the reason I had instantly trusted Elizabeth, all along, and never actually realised why?

"Come on, let me in. It's important no one sees me," urged Merry, pushing past me into the room.

The suitcase, that worried me. "What is this? What took you so long?"

"I took three different cabs to get here, changing my wig each time."

"What is all this cloak and dagger for?" I demanded, feeling, as I often felt when I was with Merry, that I was caught up in some kind of film. But it had never been a spy film before.

"To protect you. You don't know what he's like, you don't know what he's capable of." Her voice was so urgent it alarmed me.

"What is going on, Merry?"

As I looked on, astonished, she sloughed her coat, then reached up to the top button of her shirtdress, and slowly started to unfasten it. When she did not stop at her breasts, I panicked and abruptly turned away, shielding my eyes as I tried desperately to look anywhere but at her body.

"Oh, Christ, Merry, stop. This is not the time or the place..." I moved towards her, trying to pick up her coat and throw it over her, but she stepped back, away from me. "For Christ's sake, Merry, you are _married_."

"It's not what you think," she told me, her voice oddly dead. "I need you to see this, I need someone to _see_ this. Because if I told you, you just wouldn't believe me. Daniel, turn around."

"I don't want to," I insisted, not least because, despite everything, I was starting to get a stiffie, out of force of habit from her very presence, more than anything else.

"Look at me."

Something in her voice made me turn, and I saw her snatching the wig from her head and standing before me. And as I looked at her, clad only in bra and panties, I saw that her skin was a mass of bruises, from her shoulders down to her thighs. Her flesh was livid, red and purple striped on top of older blue-green bruises, the skin broken and scuffed in patches, with welts in almost the exact shape of a man's knuckles. Someone had beat her, and badly, but with such care not to show on her face or her arms that I could not believe that this was the result of anger or even passion. Whoever had done this had done this systematically and carefully. "Did he do this? Colm?" My voice shook.

"Yes," she said calmly, almost coldly. "It was my punishment for talking to you."

I tried not to stare, but I couldn't help myself, seeing those livid red marks impressed across older bruises. "This is not the first time he's done it, is it?"

She shook her head slowly, then looked down her body, and my eyes followed hers, suddenly seeing the fresh new marks across her thighs, the imprints of a man's fingers, as if he had pried her legs apart by force. "That. Yes, that is new. But I know him, it might have been the first time, but if I stay, it will not be the only time." The deadness, the lack of any audible emotion in her voice as she described what had been done to her, that shocked me almost as much as the bruises.

I struggled, but I couldn't get my head around what I was seeing. "Are you saying that he _forced_ you?" I couldn't even bring myself to say the real word. The ugly one that started with R.

She nodded so quickly I almost missed it, and I felt my face flushing, anger so deep in the pit of my stomach that I felt I could throttle that fucking actor with my bare hands. "We've got to do something. Can you go to the police?"

"Are you kidding?" she snorted, though her eyes were desperate. "It's Beverley Hills. Colm is rich and powerful. Even if I did press charges, all he has to do is snap his fingers and it just _goes away_."

"I'll kill him," I snarled, torn between conflicting desires to pull Merry into my arms and hold her close, and to tear a rampage all the way to Beverley Hills.

She shook her head, slower this time. "No more violence. I've had enough of violence and violent men."

Feeling so impotent and small, I crossed my arms, then uncrossed them, kicking the carpet before turning back to her, whispering "I would really like to hug you right now. Would it be alright if I just held you?"

"I'd like that," she said quietly, her voice quivering with emotion she could no longer seem to contain.

I moved towards her, and put my arms around her waist, touching her gingerly at first, trying to look for flesh that had no bruises, but she moved towards me of her own accord, pressing against me as she wrapped her arms about my shoulders, and pressed her face into my hair. For a long time, we just stood like that, as I felt her heart beating against my chest, and I wondered how on earth I could help her, knowing I would move heaven and earth to do so.

Finally, she released me slightly. "I need to sit down. I'm feeling rather shaky."

"OK," I told her. There was no chair, so I cleared off my bed.

"Come sit with me?" she asked, as she sank down to the mattress.

"You're married," I reminded her. "And I'm involved with someone."

"I never loved Colm the way I love you. There, I said it. I was vulnerable, I was hurting, I was an emotional open goal. But I didn't love him. I never would have married him if... Well, I never ever thought I would marry anyone until I met you. You put that idea in my head."

"That's not fair."

"It's still true. You said in that interview that I was the only person you'd ever been in love with. Well, you're the only person I ever loved enough to want to marry." 

As I looked at her, my face burned with shame at the memory of how I'd walked out on her. I'd relieved the moment a thousand times, and in every fantasy, I'd turned around, at the top of the stairs to our bedsit, at the Finchley Road tube station, at the gate to the Eurostar, I'd turned around and gone back to her and said _I'm sorry, I forgive you, let's try this again_. 

"Do you love... _her_ as much as you loved me?" Her question hung in the air. I didn't want to answer it. I didn't want to admit the truth to myself. There was no past tense with Merry. I would never not love her. Any other passing fascination seemed like a child's toy beside what I felt for her.

"Of course I don't." I sat down beside her, barely believing that any of this was happening, and yet, still, I couldn't stop staring at her lips. How could I desire her, like this, after all the things she'd just been through? I was just as much of an asshole as her husband, wasn't I? "I don't know that I can do this. I can't be this close to you and not want to kiss you," I finally whispered.

"You know if you kiss me, you get involved, and if you do, you become a co-respondant in the divorce case, and Danny, there is a divorce case coming, and it is going to be a doozy of a divorce case," she warned me. I noted, though, she didn't say she didn't want me to kiss her, in fact, she was looking at my lips with that intent, hungry expression.

"Fuck it, I'm already involved. I can't _not_ be involved, when it comes to you. I'm in this. Whatever you're in, I'm in it too. I knew that the moment I let you in my hotel room... hell, I knew that the moment that I emailed you this evening. Cindy was right; that's why she wouldn't let us talk to each other. There's no halfway with you, Merry, there's never any _casual_ with you."

"Daniel, I just want you to do one thing for me." It felt so formal when she used my full name. She never used to call me Daniel before.

I nodded. "Anything. I mean it. _Anything_." I felt like I had so much I had to make up to her.

"Do you have that camera? Because I need you to take photos of my... injuries. All of them." Her eyes flickered down towards her battered thighs. "I trust you more than I trust the police here."

"OK," I agreed. "It's only a little digital tourist camera, but... Go in the bathroom, the light's better in there."

And as I painstakingly documented her bruises and contusions, asking her to pull her panties down slightly to show the full horror of her injuries, I felt my blood boiling, my bile rising in my throat.

"I'm sorry, I can't take any more. I hope that's enough, but..." I handed her the camera, not caring if I lost a few days' worth of holiday snaps of LA.

"it's fine. Thank you," she said, her voice so flat it disturbed me. "Daniel, will you do something else for me?"

"Anything. I told you that."

"I want you to fuck me."

"Merry..." Her bluntness no longer took me by surprise, but my voice caught in my throat as I thought of those ugly purple welts across her thighs, that man's fingers dug so deep into her flesh that I could almost see his fingerprints. "Is that really a good idea?"

Her face crumpled. "Am I so ugly now? Has he ruined me so badly?"

"Oh my god, no..." Moving towards her, I tried to pull her into another embrace, but everywhere I looked, there were bruises. "I'm just afraid of hurting you any more than you already..."

"Danny." The pet name was like a shiver down my spine. No one called me Danny; no one dared, except Merry and my sister. Elizabeth always called me Dan, just like Doyle and my band did. And in a funny way, her calling me that was what made me realise she would never be _serious_ about me. Merry leaned over and cupped my face in her hands, forcing me to look up at her. Her face, still untouched, was astonishingly beautiful, even in the harsh light of the bathroom, and I felt my heart warping and melting like a heated ball of wax. "I don't know if you can even begin to understand, but... I need my body back. I need my body to be mine again, not his. I want to fuck the smell of him off me, I want to fuck even the memory of him away. I trust you more than I trust anyone, maybe even more than I trust myself. Can you do this for me?"

And in some strange way, I did actually understand. "OK, I understand. Use me, use my body, in whatever way you need," I heard my voice say, even as my emotions were reeling.

"I need you to lie back and not try to touch me. I need to do this myself."

It had always been kind of fantasy of mine, though these were never the circumstances that I would chosen to live it out. I had always wanted to be a beautiful woman's toy, her plaything, a passive object she used and abused for her own pleasure. I let my lover pull me back into the room, and arrange me on the bed, helping her by pulling off my shirt and my trousers, turning away slightly to remove my boxers. Then I lay back, trying not to touch her as she lay on top of me, and kissed me. And Christ, that kiss, how could I have ever forgotten the hungry way that she kissed me, as if she were dying of thirst and I was the only cure. I was hard already, she barely had to circle my cock with her fingers and I was leaping to attention in her hands. Sitting up, she straddled me, leaning forward as she raised her hips slightly and slipped me inside her. For a moment, she grimaced and my heart leapt, as I worried I was hurting her, but she shook her head and said "It's fine, don't worry" then bent down and kissed me again and started to move against me, clasping me firmly inside her as I tried not to move, just letting her ride me.

We fit together so easily. Her rhythm came back to me so naturally, letting my head loll back as she hit her stroke, her breaths growing shorter and shorter as a relieved smile spread across her face. "I need your hand," she said, reaching for me, and putting it between her legs. I smiled and felt my way between her outer lips with my thumb, finding her clitoris and teasing her, pushing in the opposite direction to her strokes, until she started to cry out aloud. "Oh god, you always were so good at this," she gasped, as she changed the angle of her hips, and raised herself to let me get a good friction going. She was so close I could feel it, could feel her whole body tense and release as her breath exhaled in that painting "ah-ah-ah-ah-aaaaahhhh" that I knew meant she was coming.

And then she slumped back against me, showering my face with kisses, and breathing my name. I laughed with pride and quickened my stroke. "Do I have to pull out, or are you still on The Pill?"

"Go ahead, I'm OK," she told me, and I felt myself explode up inside her, marking her all over again as mine. I wanted there to never be anyone else, really inside her, ever again.

Then she rolled off me and rolled over, just flopping back onto the bed and staring at me, tracing my face with her fingertips, as if memorising the angle of my crooked nose, my wide cheekbones, the mouth she had once described as 'kitten-lips'. But just as I was catching my breath, feeling the euphoria of post-orgasmic bliss spreading slowly across my whole body, she spoke. "We're going to have to go soon."

"Go where?" I raised my arm and checked my watch, then ran my other hand down the side of her face, caressing her cheek. Christ, I was not ready to go anywhere or do anything, I was just an internal mess of a whirlwind of emotions swirling round my head. Merry. Oh fuck. I had just fucked Merry, who only a few hours ago, I thought I would never see again. Merry, who was supposed to be married to another man, but when Merry was back in my life and back in my bed, it was like all my principles just evaporated. The glow of orgasm was fading fast, but the feeling that _doing whatever Merry needed_ was an instinct even stronger than self preservation, that didn't shift. Whatever she asked next, I knew I would do.

"I don't know. But anywhere but here. He'll finish dinner at 10, probably go to his favourite bar for an hour or two, drive home and be back at midnight, one at the latest... when he comes back and finds me not at the house, this is the first place he'll look. He heard Taylor as well as I did, he knows where you're staying."

"Let him come," I growled, trying to act tough, but Merry shook her head, leaning over and kissing me softly before replying.

"If he comes, he'll have a gun. We need to get out of here."

"And go where?" My brain raced ahead. A gun. What the fuck had I got myself into? But all I could think of was protecting Merry. Thank, Daniel, think. "Can I take you back to New York?"

"I can't get on a plane without my passport." She shook her head mournfully as she got up and started to dress again, pulling on her shirtdress.

I felt suddenly cold, wanting her to get back into bed and cuddle with me some more. I had two years worth of cuddling to catch up on. I didn't want to be thrust into this terrifying world of guns and jealous husbands; I wanted to drift back into the nostalgia of the past for a little while longer. But her movements were urgent, as she retrieved her wig and sat before the mirror, smoothing it back into place. 

Raising myself on one arm, I looked over at her, trying to work my way through it like a puzzle. "Where can you get another passport? Is there a British Consulate in Los Angeles?"

"We can't stay in LA," she insisted. "He'll find us. Do you not understand? His most famous role was as a gritty, working-class cop who 'played by his own rules'. He spent two months undercover at the LAPD, preparing for the role. So he has loads of fans that are cops. He knows most of them by name, they'd do anything for him. The last time I left, and just went to a hotel in Malibu, they found me in 20 minutes. We have got to get out of California."

"Canada," I remembered. "There's a British Consulate in Vancouver. Doyle got a temporary visa there after his passport got stolen on tour. Shit... we can't go by train or by plane, because you haven't got a passport... I guess I'll have to drive you."

"You can't drive," Merry reminded me.

"I knew I learned how to drive for a reason," I smirked. Actually, I'd learned so I could drive to baseball away games out on Long Island, but she didn't need to know that, not yet. There would be time, eventually, to tell her everything, on that long-ass drive up to Canada. "Come on, let me get packed."

I dressed, then left her in the room while I padded softly to Taylor's room and knocked on the door. "Taylor, I need the keys to your car."

"Where are you going at this time of night? We have to leave for the airport early tomorrow, remember?" She yawned and stretched.

"Taylor, I'm not going with you. Something has come up. Something more important than anything else in my life. So I'm going to ask you to go to the airport by yourself, but just tell the rental car agency that you still need the car for a few more days, maybe a week. OK? I will pay you back, but I need this now, and please, don't ask questions."

"It's Merry, isn't it?"

"I can't tell you anything," I insisted. "If anyone asks, you heard we were headed for Mexico. This is important. Tell them _Mexico_."

"Look, that actor is an asshole. I know it. I just read about his first divorce on Oh No They Didn't. Get her the fuck away from him, OK? I haven't seen you, I know nothing." Picking up the car keys off her night stand, she threw them at me. "OK, Mexico. Good luck."

I caught them deftly, and winked as I darted out of the room. And hand in hand, me and an incognito brunette Merry took the elevator down out of the hotel to freedom. Anyone who saw us together would just think it was Elizabeth. We were going to escape.

We talked in the car, just catching up at first, listening to the radio until the station faded, then telling each other about our lives. I told her about Marge, and about being in the hospital, and about how loneliness had driven me to Elizabeth. And then she told me about Colm, how he'd come on so strong while she was still completely in pieces over the breakup, vulnerable, and at a spare end after The Racists' brief album tour had finished.

At first, he'd seemed so perfect and understanding, until she'd come first to rely on him, and then depend on him for everything, unable to function on her own, without his approval. It wasn't until after they'd got married, in a whirlwind romance, that he'd changed. They'd married too early, after only knowing each other about six months. And then it was like he'd thrown a switch, and turned into a jealous, possessive rageaholic, who treated her like another possession with which to fill his Beverley Hills bungalow. He'd hit her first over that interview with Third Wave where she had talked about me. He'd beaten her savagely, but so dispassionately that he pretended it hadn't even happened the next day, and were it not for the bruises all over her ribcage, she would have started to doubt her own sanity. Things had been OK, for another month or two, but after he found the issue of CTCL - I couldn't believe she'd kept it - he had started to terrorise her regularly. I winced to realise my part in it, apologised for the interview - Christ, I'd had no idea.

"No. I needed that interview. You have no idea what it meant to me. But I blame myself, really, for what Colm did to me," she confessed, as our car reached the coast at Santa Monica, and turned North, headed for Malibu and the Pacific Coast Highway. "How could I let that happen to me? Me, of all people, newly crowned feminist icon. I should have known, but I didn't see it coming. I just ran into it blindly."

I thought about how blindly I had nearly propelled myself into marriage with Elizabeth, at exactly that same 6 month mark. "I know exactly what it was like. Get off a year-long tour that you've used to distract yourself from your broken heart, and you're just at a loose end, jonesing for intimacy. I was very lucky that Elizabeth said no to me. It's not your fault. It's his fault. How were you supposed to know that the guy was... that he was... well, an emotional terrorist." I hated using her phrase like that, especially a phrase that had had such emotional resonance in our breakup, but it was the only that fit that asshole's behaviour.

"But I've always been so terrified of intimacy," she insisted. "You absolutely got me, spot on, in that interview, when you said that. All those codes and locks and safe-words, designed to keep intimacy at bay. I used them again and again, with you, refusing to call myself your girlfriend, refusing to even use the word love, all those careful defence mechanisms I spent so long perfecting, to keep people at bay until I figured out by tests if I could trust them or not... They kept you out, they locked you out, but that man, he just walked through them as if they weren't even there."

"They didn't keep me out, not really," I told her softly, reaching for her hand as we hit a long, straight stretch of road. "You have always been the only person I have ever let inside my head. And I like it."

"Yes, but they kept me from really trusting you, from really telling you what was going on in my innermost heart. You're right, you let me in all the way. But I don't know that I ever really let you all the way inside me. There are, still, things that you don't know about me."

"What else could there be left?" Taking my eyes from the road from a moment, I risked a glance at her. She had taken the dark wig off, and her butter-blonde hair almost glowed in the moonlight. "I know I've been an asshole about things, when you have told me the really important things. The stripping thing... the abortion. I don't know that I'd blame you for keeping secrets from me. But I am here, and I am trying to listen to you."

And as she held my hand, and stroked it, she'd told me the story of the night her brother had died. She told me how she blamed herself for that, because she'd woken in the middle of the night, roused by a weird smell that made her feel funny, kinda sick. So she'd padded through into their parents' room. She went by herself, instead of waking her brother up and taking him with her, and she could never forgive herself for that midnight, sleepy-headed decision. And she blamed herself for going straight downstairs with her mother, instead of going back to his room and getting him. And how after that, she'd sworn she'd never let anyone else love her, for fear she would make the wrong decision and let them down again.

And I listened, and cried with her, wiping the tears with my shirtsleeve so I could see the road, and held her hand and squeezed it, as the car hurtled into the night. Ten years, I had known her - well, ten years since I had first seen her outside the Pink Pony. And this one thing, that she had never trusted me enough to tell me, until now. That she'd never trusted anyone enough to tell, not even her mother.

"That's what stopped you? That's what always kept you from me?" I asked, almost afraid of the answer. Because all along, I'd thought it was something that was wrong with _me_ , that she'd needed all those strange rituals and codewords to keep me away.

"But I killed my brother," she confessed.

"You did not kill your brother. You were 11. You were a child. You made a decision on instinct that saved your life. You are not responsible for what happened to Marcus. I know that you are not."

"But it is my fault, I should have gone, I should have tried to get back to our room," she insisted.

"You don't know that would have saved him. Even your father couldn't. A grown man, and you a little girl. You might have died yourself, and not even saved him. You made the right decision."

"But I didn't. And I don't. I make decisions that kill the people I love, I hurt them because of my stupid fucking choices. I made the wrong decision over having our baby, and that ended up destroying you."

"You didn't destroy me," I told her. "I destroyed me."

"You never forgave me for the abortion, did you? It was the wrong decision, made for all the wrong reasons..."

"No. You made the right decision about that abortion," I finally conceded. "Metropolis had just signed to a major label, who wanted their pound of flesh for the money they'd invested. MVC would never have let me have time off. I could not have gone through that Mountaineering press campaign and that insane tour with a new baby. I saw what Dick struggled with - even though he was just our drummer - and I could not have done it. That recording session was one of the most emotionally intense and traumatic experiences that... you were right. I would not even have been able to make that decision, under those circumstances. You made the decision for me. You spared me something I could not have done, and I am... well, I recognise now, that I'm grateful for that. You gave up something you loved and really wanted, for _me_. I see that now, that you did it for me. And you should not have given up the solo album you needed to make, because I was incapable of making a decision. Your decision was the right one. I was an asshole not to see it. It's not an excuse, but I was in a shitty emotional state, back in Swiss Cottage. I was an asshole. A devastated, traumatised asshole who had just watched his hometown burn to the ground, but an asshole nonetheless. That was my fault, not yours."

"It wasn't your fault, I should have told you."

"Yes, you should have told me, and that was what hurt the worst. Like... was that even fair, me finding out from a pop song on the radio, when you still hadn't told me yourself?"

Merry bit her lip reproachfully. "I know, and... I'm sorry. If I could go back and change... except no. I couldn't. I didn't know _how_ to tell you. That's what I do with the things I can't express. I put them in songs, I've always put them in songs - like messages I wanted to get to you when my words wouldn't work. Like that old B-side, _I'm the sweetheart of the radio_ , remember? Like that huge single, _Deeper Than Dreaming_ \- you knew that one was about you, too, right?"

She sung the long-familiar tune softly, and I remembered sharply the sweetness of the shock that all of the yearning and love in that song had been directed towards me. _I can dream about you, you know, but your love goes deeper than dreaming_. I couldn't help it, I chimed in on the call and response harmony in the background. "Deeper than dreaming - so much deeper; Sweeter than cream - so much sweeter..." It had been nice, dating a songwriter, when the songs were all about how much she loved and missed me.

She sighed deeply. "I should have told you right away, but you were so wrapped up in recording. And then I should have told you when I came back to NYC, but we were all so wrapped up in our record deal. And then the longer it went, the harder it became to find a way to bring it up. And there was a part of me that thought, deep down, if I didn't tell you, that made it not true. But there was a bigger part of me, I guess, that _needed_ you to know. So maybe I wrote the song hoping you would hear it and understand. But..." Her voice faded out as she did that pretty little shrug she'd learned from me. "I guess that backfired."

I took a deep breath. "OK, I guess in a way, that was my fault, too. You're right, I totally was avoiding your calls. Like I said, it was an insanely intense session. I was too wrapped up in the studio, too wrapped up in being jealous of Doyle's crush on you, too fucking selfish."

"Doyle does not have a crush on me..."

"He does, you know," I acknowledged. "It came out during that recording session. You know _Menage_ is about you. I freaked out when I found out, but..."

" _What_?" exploded Merry.

"No, it totally is. He told me he wrote it after that afternoon where he walked in on you and me, _at it_ , and he..." I attempted a half shrug with one hand still on the wheel. "I think the lyrics are pretty self explanatory as to what he wants, once you understand that."

Merry stared at the window with that tenseness to her jaw that meant she was furious, but she was thinking it over before she said anything. But I'd misjudged the source of the fury when she finally turned back to me. "So you were pissed off that you found out about my abortion from what was supposed to be an obscure non-album-track B-side, while you were perfectly happy to release a whole fucking single featuring Doyle shouting about how much he wants to _taste my honeyed womb_? For real? You don't see the slightest thing hypocritical about that?"

"I was as upset about it as you are!" I protested.

"Yeah, I bet you were," snapped Merry, her eyes flashing, and for a moment, I was super-angry, but then in another moment, all of the anger had drained out of me. Merry and I were scrapping, arguing like an old married couple. It was as if the previous two years of us being apart had never happened, and we were right back in the tightly-wound thicket of the old bonds that pulled us closer and closer together the more we squabbled about them.

"Yes, I was jealous, like I've always been jealous over you," I confessed. "Because secretly, I never really believed that I deserved a goddess like you. But then we talked, and I got over it. Actually... I'm OK with it. He sees you not as a lover, but as some kind of muse, as some kind of inspiration. And y'know, he's right. You are an inspiration, you are my muse, and my motivation, and the reason I got up in the morning - and I have never thanked you for that. Like I never thanked you for writing the bassline for Ugly."

"Ha!" she said, her voice finally lightening into laughter. "So you finally admit it."

"I should have said that in CTCL, too, huh? It's true. Merry Wythenshawe wrote the bassline for Ugly. Shall I ring up Rolling Stone when we get to Canada and make the announcement? Bassline from _Ugly_? Merry's. Also, Metropolis: better in bed than Dead Letters. Fact."

She was laughing openly now, with her hand over her mouth. "I fucking daw you, Danny Asheton. I love you more than Echo and the Bunnymen, and Gorgonzola cheese, and my parents."

"Merry...?" I reached out and took her hand, risking a glance at her as the road came to a long, straight stretch. "Merry can I ask you something?"

"What?"

"Tell me about your brother. What was he like?"

For a second, I thought she was going to cry, but then she wiped her eyes and smiled at me brightly. "My brother... He was the funniest, smartest, most mischievous guy that ever lived. He could always make me laugh out loud with just a single word - not even a word, just the way he would raise one eyebrow at me. You would have liked him so much - you two would have got on so well. He also loved music, as much as you do, and in all the same ways - you would have been best friends, had you ever met..." And then she took a deep breath and told me everything.

We drove for hours, well into the night, until we were clear of LA, and then we stopped at a tiny motel near the coast, where I paid cash and gave a fake name. And in a tiny cabin near the roar of the ocean, I fell asleep in Merry's arms, chronic insomniac that I had become, and slept my first good night of dreamless sleep in over two years.

In the morning, I heard her swearing from the bathroom, so I climbed out of bed and went to her, putting my arms around her from behind, resting my head against her shoulder and staring at our reflection. She was still two and a half inches taller than me, in her bare feet. I had always loved that about her, my towering, statuesque goddess. If I ignored the bruises, we looked like the old Merry and Danny, two young kids in love. "Come back to bed, we've got a few hours before we have to check out, and I've got something I need to give you," I informed her, rubbing myself between her buttocks to give her an idea of what I had in mind.

"I've left my fucking pills back at Colm's house. Fuck!"

"I don't mind," I told her, reaching up to my teeth gently against the soft skin of her neck. "I know the deal. I get you pregnant; you have to marry me."

I had meant it as a joke, but she turned around in my grasp, frowning at me quizzically. "Are we back to this again?" she said softly. "The rituals and the games? Because I thought we were done with that."

"No." I realised the old pattern we were falling into, and pulled myself up sharp. "We're not back to this. I just want to be with you, married, or not. Pregnant, or not. Deal, or no deal. No games, no conditions. Just you and me. However we are."

She smiled slowly, the grin spreading across her face as she realised I was serious. "I will marry you some day. I swear it. But... You know this divorce may take some time. Colm's lawyers are sharks."

"I don't care. I'll wait," I insisted, and kissed her.

"No, you won't," she laughed, flicking the tip of my nose. "Get back into bed. We'll have a quickie, and then we need to get back on the road."

After we managed to get one another off, she disappeared off to the shower. I made a pot of coffee, then reached for my laptop, logging onto Mapquest and trying to work out the easiest way to drive to Vancouver. But as I surfed about, sipping unsweetened coffee from a cracked mug, an email from Doyle dropped into my inbox.

'dude, where are you. taylor and i have found the perfect studio. it's just out in brooklyn, really convenient. it's fucking beautiful, all analogue, that old 60s shit u love. dude is willing to give us mates rates if he can get a metropolis engineering credit to his name. but u need 2 get back here & check it out. soon, b4 mvc stop signing our cheques. c u soon, doyle x'

"Shit," I said, as Merry returned from the bathroom, towel-drying her hair.

"What is it?" she asked, bending over to kiss the top of my curly head.

"Nothing," I assured her, typing the recording studio's name into google and looking up their gear list. Hot damn, that recording console, it was beautiful, with old fashioned manual VU meters on the dash.

"That face doesn't look like nothing. That face looks like you have just met the girl of your dreams," she teased.

"Doyle has found us a studio," I told her, and turned the laptop screen around so she could see, too. "It's beautiful, but we've got to move on the booking, quick, or our recording budget is just gonna get swallowed up in the chaos of our contract getting bought out from MVC by Windlass."

"Do you need to go? Because if you need to be there, I can drop you at the airport in San Francisco, and drive on to Vancouver by myself. I mean, this is your band. And Windlass? I know that's your dream come true, being a Windlass band. And it's the follow-up to Mountaineering, the amount of pressure, you must be feeling... I understand how much this record means to you. If you need to go and make it right now, go and make it."

I looked up at Merry, then looked down at the 1960s vintage analogue recording desk, then looked back up at Merry, my kitten lips twitching up in a smile. I'd stood at this threshold once before, when my band had been booked to play a Peel Session, and I had sacrificed our relationship on the altar of my own ambition. This time things would be different. I knew what was required of me, as a musician, and I knew what was required of me as an adult in the relationship I wanted to keep for the rest of my life. Merry never complained, in fact, she often encouraged me to make a musician's choices, rather than a lover's choices. She had urged me to go on that European tour, knowing full well it would cost us our relationship, because that was what my band needed. She had made the decision to terminate her pregnancy so that I could make a grab at the brass ring of a major label contract, even if it had been the death of our marriage. All of those choices had been the right decision for the band. But at this moment, I knew the right choice to make. 

"Nah, it's OK. The studio can wait, and if it can't, Doyle can find us another one. I need to get you to Vancouver, and I need to get you safe." Closing the browser window, I shut down the laptop, then snapped it closed. "Let's get this show on the road."

She smiled at me strangely as she followed me out to the car. "You've changed."

"Not in a bad way, I hope." Aiming the keychain at the car, I clicked it, and was still amused by the cricket chirp of the automated unlock. No matter how many times I did that, it still felt like some James Bond magic.

Sliding into the passenger seat beside me, she stared out at the view. It had been so dark when we'd pulled into the motel that we had noticed neither the mountains, nor the misty blue line of the sea in the distance. "No, not bad. Just different." She paused as I carefully backed the car out of the parking lot and headed for the highway. "When I met you, I think you were the single most ambitious person I had ever met."

Oh. Was that what this was about. "I'm still ambitious, you know. But right now, my ambition is not to make the best damn indie-rock album anyone's ever heard; my ambition is to be the best goddamn partner that you need right now. I have already proved that I can make fucking great indie-rock albums. I've totally failed you as a boyfriend, again and again. It's up to me, now, to make that up to you."

She turned towards me slightly, and reached out, resting her hand on the back of my shoulders, before tangling her fingers in my hair, a gesture at once both intimately familiar, and totally unexpected. "I didn't mean it in a bad way, Danny. I admired your ambition."

"Really? Everyone else always gave me a hard fucking time for it."

"Who did? Your band?" she asked. I nodded. "No they didn't. They fucked relied on it. We all did. Your ambition was taking you straight to the top, and you pulled all of us up with it."

"Huh." I stared out the window at the road, thinking of all the times I'd had to berate my band into doing what turned out to be best for all of us.

"And you know, really... I loved your ambition, because..." And here she lowered her voice, like she was confiding a secret. "It gave me the permission to be ambitious. It gave me permission to want more."

"You were always ambitious, I think that's one of the things that drew us to one another. You aspired to something more than all those kids sloshing round the East Village, pretending to be cool."

"Maybe I did, but I was such a doormat in my own band."

"You were never a doormat with me." I moved my head from side to side slightly, enjoying the feeling of her fingers in my hair as she pulled out my carefully straightened curls.

"Maybe I should have been."

"No." I risked a glance at her, as the highway straightened out. "It was one of the things I most admired about you, how you stood up to me, just as much as you stood up for me. I don't think I ever thanked you for that, and I really should have." Reaching up, I covered her hand with mine, clasping it against my hair. "I took you for granted, back in those days. I just want you to know, I am never going to take you for granted again."

"Danny after you do this for me, after you just drop everything, to come and bail me out and rescue me from a stupid dumb-ass fucking situation I got myself into... I owe you now. I owe you everything. I think you can take my love for granted for the rest of your fucking life."

"No," I said softly, taking her hand and bringing it around, raising it to my lips to kiss her palm. "Your love is something I am going to endeavour to be worthy of, every day of my life, from now on."

It took us another two days to drive to Vancouver. Two days that managed to somehow erase the two years we had spent apart, as we fell back into our easy habits without even trying. I had known Merry so long, been through so much with her that it was like being with her was written into my very DNA. She remembered how I took my tea - Earl Grey, milk, no sugar - she searched for my vegetarian sandwiches - _no mayo_ \- and she even read the map the way she knew I liked it, telegraphing information in advance - first there will be a post office, then a side street called Lewis Passage, don't go down that one, go down Lewis Avenue, opposite the church, look, where that white van has just gone down.

There was a hairy moment as we crossed the border, as I deliberately did not take out my passport, but instead reached for my drivers licence, as we pulled up at the toll-booth like immigration kiosk. The officer looked at my licence, then squinted at me. "Now you're a long way from home, son," he said evenly, with those drawn-out Canadian vowels. "What is the purpose of your visit to Canada?"

"My new wife and I are just on a little vacation," I said nonchalantly, glancing over to make sure that Merry was wearing the wedding ring she'd taken off back in LA. "We wanted to drive through the mountains, check out the view."

"Newlyweds?" the officer said, with an indulgent smile, and I tried to nod with the vague shellshock of a newly married man. "Canada sure is pretty for a Honeymoon, yes sir. How long do you plan on staying?"

"Just a few days, sir... but mostly the nights, if you know what I mean," I said quickly.

"Sure do." The immigration officer chuckled and winked at me pointedly. "Can I just see some ID from your wife?"

"Do you have your drivers licence on you, honey?" I asked, trying to keep the nerves out of my voice.

"Sure do," Merry chirped, without even the hint of her residual accent. "But bear in mind it's still in my maiden name. Haven't had the chance to change it yet." She flashed me a grin that almost convinced _me_ we were married. "Here you go, sir." She passed it over - thank fuck it was still a New York licence, so that we matched - and I handed it through the window.

The man barely glanced at it before handing them both back. "I do have to say, I think you're so much prettier with longer hair now, Mrs Asheton," he flirted, as Merry laughed and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "You two have a nice honeymoon, you hear? Enjoy your stay in Canada." With that, he raised the barrier and waved us on. We were through. It was only as Merry breathed an audible sigh of relief, that I noticed how white her knuckles were against the dash of the car.

In Vancouver, we checked into a hotel together, under my name, then she rang the Consulate and made an appointment for the next afternoon. And as she went off to sort her life out, I sat down by the side of the bed, picked up the phone and rang Elizabeth, to resolve my life properly, like an adult, for once.

"Hi," I said to her, feeling my stomach swirling around, both with nerves, and the conviction that I had to get this right. "It's me, Daniel. We need to talk."

"Yeah, I figured, when Taylor came back from LA without you, that something had happened." Her voice sounded so small, so sad, close up in my ear.

"I am sorry. I am really sorry, but we do have to end this. It's not you, you're an amazing woman, and you deserve to be deeply loved... but..." I grasped for what to say. _It's not me that can love you?_ How did I do this without coming across like a total asshole? I didn't; I just had to do it anyway.

"But it's your ghost, isn't it? She's blown back into your life again, hasn't she. Like she always does."

"It is Merry," I said, and I realised that it was the first time I had ever said her name aloud to Elizabeth. "Yes. She's come back to me. I need to make a clean break with you, so we can make a go of it."

"You're an asshole, Daniel Asheton, and I never want to see you again right now," she sighed, sounding resigned than angry. "But I knew you were only ever on loan, that you would never really be mine."

"I am so, so sorry," I repeated.

"Goodbye, Daniel. I hope she finally makes you happy." The phone clicked dead in my hand.

But several hours later, when Merry walked back through the door of our hotel room, bearing a stamped and notarised letter, with a grainy photo of her laminated to the top, I felt my heart lift. "We are good to go. The British are nothing if not efficient. They took my fingerprints, emailed them off to London, and they came back confirming I'm me. This visa is good for three months, so I can go back to New York and reapply for a full passport from there. Though... and I hope this wasn't too presumptuous..." For a moment she actually looked worried. "When they asked for my address, I gave them yours. I told them I would be living with you. Like, _Living With You_ , living with you. That will make you a co-respondent in the divorce, and it could get very ugly, but I want this in writing, that you are my _partner_ in life. Is that OK?"

"Is that _OK_?" I asked, then lay back on our bed and just whooped for joy. "Hot damn!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lied; this isn't the last chapter. There will be a brief "where are they now" epilogue shortly after this.


	46. Coda - Metropolis: The Pitchfork Interview

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little catch-up with Metropolis, two years into the future, upon the release of their fourth album, _New York_.

Pitchfork - Album Review / Interview  
Metropolis - _New York  
_ Rating: 9.3

 

We are waiting for Daniel J. Asheton Jr, in a plush meeting room at Windlass Records' Manhattan headquarters. True, some of us have been waiting for a new Metropolis album for nearly four years. His bandmates, singer Doyle Saunders, bassist Dieter de la Xibalba (the recently added surname is a tribute to the natural father he finally met while mountain-climbing in Mexico), and drummer Dick Sticciano, are amused by this tardiness which is, apparently, highly unusual for the self-described "control freak" guitarist. When Asheton finally arrives, twenty minutes after our scheduled start time, he looks tanned and healthy, with a broad grin. He has the slightly harried air of a man who has, indeed, only just returned from a honeymoon in Paris, after finally marrying his long-term girlfriend, Merry Wythenshawe of art-rockers The Racists. But Asheton has quite some excuse for his lateness.

"I might as well tell you all the announcement," says Asheton. "We're just back from the doctor. Merry is pregnant, four months along."

Amidst the band's congratulations and hearty back-slapping, P4K asks "Boy or a girl?"

"Twins," replies Asheton, throwing his hands in the air with the heady grin of a man who cannot quite believe his luck. "Hot damn, twins! Two little baby girls!"

Indeed, Metropolis have just delivered their own set of twins, a sprawling, ambitious double album, divided into two halves, named "City" and "Country", the whole thing coming together under the title "New York".

"So in a way, it's self titled, because New York was the original Metropolis," Saunders explains.

De la Xibalba fixes him with a disbelieving expression. "New York was hardly the original metropolis. I think you'll find it was ancient Athens." For a few minutes, the pair of them squabble over the details, until de la Xibalba produces an iPhone and looks it up on wikipedia. He is, of course, correct. Saunders backs down, rolling his eyes.

So how does it feel, being back at Windlass?

"It's not back, for the rest of us," Saunders says. "It's only Daniel's old stomping ground."

Asheton, of course, worked at Windlass for much of the mid 90s, until his own band was signed, famously discovering and then doing A&R for his wife's former band, Deltawave. "It feels like coming home, to be honest. It's where I feel we've always belonged, though they did turn us down about four times along the way. But I do feel our strange and circuitous journey has made us a better band, learning from our mistakes. Windlass and Metropolis only came together when it was right for both of us."

Do they want to talk about their split with MVC? Did they not get the perks that a major label offered them? Were they promised helicopters that were never delivered?

"Yeah, that's it. Helicopters," says Sticciano, his bright blue eyes twinkling. "Yeah, we need helicopters at this point to keep track of all of us. We live in about three or four different states now."

Sticciano returned long ago to his native Dallas, where he runs a cattle ranch with his wife Clara. He owns a principle stake in Stakehaus, the trendy heritage beef-bar chain that he co-runs with members of other legendary NYC bands, The Stakes and The Rocket Pops.

De la Xibalba has moved upstate, retreating to a former farm in the Green Mountains of Vermont, which he shares with his partner, Cindy Birdweather, a former pop singer and long-time music industry insider. To P4k's surprise, de la Xibalba has established a respected second career as a nature writer, penning two books, one on his adventures in the Tien Shan Mountains, and another on the complicated interrelationship between humans and birds. Both tomes have won him plaudits from luminaries such as Robert MacFarlane and George Monbiot for his sensitivity to philosophical and environmental issues as much as his literary qualities. He seems to wear his intellectualism more easily these days, no longer the same bassist who once buttonholed music journalists for urgent discussions of Adorno or Baudrillard. But in between all this writing, he has still managed to pen and produce " _The Presentation Of The Unpresentable_ " as "Racetropolis", with Dolores and JohnRoger of The Racists, a charity record aimed at raising support for Marriage Equality. De la Xibalba, who has long had a reputation for hedonism and promiscuity, claims he practices polyamory himself, but has proven himself an outspoken advocate of LGBT rights.

When we suggest that it might be admirable, for a man known for rampant womanising, to be so committed to LGBT rights, Dieter fixes us with an unamused glare. "Is there not a _B_ in LGBT?" he suggests.

You're bisexual? Now that is a scoop.

"I've known I was bi since I was 13, so I'm not sure why it's such a scoop for you."

Saunders is the only member of the band that has stayed true to the band's NYC roots, still owning, living above and occasionally tending bar at the notorious Williamsburg hothouse for exciting new music, Doyle's Bar And Pizza Grill, jokingly known as DBPG's in the scene. From a tiny dive bar without even a proper stage - though this did not stop exciting new Brooklyn bands like Interpol and Gang Gang Dance from playing early gigs there - it has expanded to take up an entire city block, featuring not just the original bar, but two venues, an intimate club space and a large theater, a tobacco lounge, a gallery/art space, and a 4-room rehearsal studio. His partner, Elizabeth, officially manages the whole shebang, but Doyle still likes to keep a keen interest in the new music scene. Outside of Metropolis, Saunders has been keeping busy these past few years with his own solo career. But why the fake name, Alleyn Montague, for that project? Did he not want Metropolis to know what he was up to?

"Oh no, I did it completely with Daniel's blessing. After six solid years of the album-tour-album-tour grind, I needed to go off and re-discover who I was. I think we all did. And it's not really a pseudonym. My parents saddled me with all these extra middle names, like I've got a whole extra person in there. I set out to discover who Alleyn Montague was. And, as it turns out, he's a pretty good turntablist and IDM producer."

That was, I think, quite a shock for Metropolis' fanbase, who expected spiky, atmospheric guitar rock, and were rewarded with lush, Boards of Canada style electronica.

"That guitar rock stuff, those bands have always been Daniel's and the other guys' influences," Doyle protests. "Daniel writes the songs obviously, though Dieter has always been the most outspoken member of the group, when it comes to getting his personal tastes and opinions across. So this was my chance to say what I'm about."

And in turn it seems like you've been able to work some of those more dancefloor-oriented impulses back into the Metropolis sound.

"Yeah. We definitely have. OK, it's not like overnight we turned from Joy Division into New Order, but this record was recorded in a very different way to the others. That brought an added dimension. Even as the click track we used for the synths was driving Dan crazy over there." The look that Saunders throws Asheton speaks of pure affection.

"Nah, it's cool. I like a lot of that electronic stuff." Asheton is diplomatic as ever. "Merry's had a very pronounced effect on my record collection over the years. I even like the new Radioshack direction now! It's good to be able to bring that diversity to the table. It's something she complained about, in an interview ages ago. People over-exaggerate the influence of my band on hers, but they never mention the influence of hers on mine. I owe so much to my wife."

"Then again we nearly didn't record another Metropolis album at all, because of your wife," Dick interjects.

"That's not true," Daniel protests, though he has spent much of the past two years shuttling back and forth between his family home in London and Berlin, where his wife's band is based.

"You did disappear to Europe, for, like, a year, while Merry's divorce was going on," Doyle points out. "But that was what gave me the space to be able to do my second solo album, so I guess it worked out alright. Hell, if you guys hadn't have run off, I would never have landed the studio where I recorded."

"Are we here to promote your solo record, or are we promoting the new Metropolis album?" Dieter cuts in cattily, shooting Doyle an icy look. Doyle shrugs and spreads his hands in defeat. "I think Daniel moving to London was actually a boon. It forced us to work in a really different way than what we were used to. Because he and I were bouncing ideas back and forth with one another using the internet, it naturally impelled us strongly towards the electronic milieu."

"Yeah, that was actually pretty fun," agrees Daniel. "This was the first Metropolis album that we didn't start recording with four guys in a studio, tinkering about with guitars. It started with, like, soundfiles and MIDI and digitally sequenced orchestration and exploring different instrumentation. Not being able to gather as, like, four guys together in a room, it forced us to grow and change."

"You have to grow and change, in order to survive. Look what happens to the dinosaurs that prevaricate and stagnate." De la Xibalba is less diplomatic. "We are the last band of our generation remaining, really."

Surely that's a bit uncharitable? 

"Not at all."

But then again, there has long been a healthy sense of competition between Metropolis and the other NYC bands of their generation, hasn't there?

"Well, I suppose it depends what you mean by competition. It's hard to compete with bands that have broken up. Deltawave imploded after 2 albums - don't get me wrong, I love the material that Merry has been performing with The Racists. But it's a million miles away from Deltawave, and so much better for it. They function more as an art collective than a rock band. The Charms, sure, they managed to put out four albums before retiring to become globe-trotting super-producers for the likes of Jezebel, but they lost their singer after the second album, and lost their guitarist after their third. The Rocket Pops squeezed out only one album before Jeremy had his little accident in a Leeds hotel room, and The Louche have never really caught on in the same way. The Stakes, I don't know if they've technically broken up or if they're on indefinite hiatus, or what..." de la Xibalba looks over at Sticciano for back-up.

"Yeah, I dunno either," Sticciano shrugs. "Jules has done two solo albums, Fab has done three. Fab keeps asking me to play drums when he tours, but it's awkward for business. If I do it for one, I have to do it for the other, and someone has to watch the shop."

"Well, that's it," says de la Xibalba. "We're the last."

"Motion Sickness are still going," Saunders points out. "Last I heard they were working on a new album."

"Motion Sickness?" De la Xibalba seems shocked. "As in Erland and Darin?" He produces his iPhone again and looks it up. "Wow. I had no idea. They've released seven albums at this point." He looks up, completely flabbergasted. "Seven! I'm surprised Darin still has a liver. Then again, most of us are surprised Daniel still has a liver, and he's still with us."

But Asheton has completely tuned out of the conversation, staring off into space with a slightly shell-shocked but delighted expression. When I catch his eye, he grins, and murmurs "Twins! I always knew they ran in Merry's family, but... Wow. Twins. I'm a lucky man."

Sounds like some big lifestyle changes are coming your way. Time to add a nursery on to the Soho loft?

"Well, we actually sold our loft in Soho and bought a house in Brooklyn when we moved back to New York, earlier this year. A whole house! In Brooklyn! For the same price we got for just a loft on Manhattan. Can you believe it? So now we have a whole house, three floors and a basement. Mostly because Merry and I wanted to be able to play music super-loud when we jam out together, without worrying about the neighbours."

Any chance of an Asheton-Wythenshawe supergroup, then?

"Yeah, for a while we were thinking about it! Everyone else in Metropolis was doing solo albums, so we thought we might record an album together some day. A sort of husband-wife shoegaze love-in. But we decided our special solo project would be kids instead of albums. I guess we'll be putting a nursery up in the attic now."

"A nursery?" protests Saunders. "I thought we were building a studio to record the fifth album, in our own time, without Windlass breathing down our necks."

Asheton merely shrugs and spreads his hands apologetically. "Changed priorities, man. Changed priorities. I got a wife and kids now." He beams as he says this, the radiant smile of a man who has attained everything he ever wanted.


End file.
